

mm | mm 



IP 









II 






iME 



IBf 

.■/ ■ . i 



library of congress. 

TtTW-a — 

Chap. Copyright No.. 

Shelf_.:.!l3 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AGNOSTICISM AND RELIGION 



By the Same Author 



KANTIAN ETHICS AND THE ETHICS OF 
EVOLUTION. 8vo. $2.00. 

THE ETHICAL IMPORT OF DARWINISM. 
12mo. $1.50. 

BELIEF IN GOD : ITS ORIGIN, NATURE, 
AND BASIS. 12mo. $1.25. 

AN EXAMINATION OF THE CRITICAL PHI- 
LOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT. 

(In Preparation.) 



AGNOSTICISM AND 
RELIGION 



BY 



JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN 

President of Cornell University 



WAR 7 J 896/ 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1896 



• S3 



COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mas9. U.S.A. 



" The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the 
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, 
and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, 
so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disen- 
thrall ourselves, and then we shall save our \religion~\" 



CONTENTS 



PART I 

PAGE 

Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism . . 1 



PART II 

Philosophical Agnosticism . . . .83 

PART III 

Spiritual Religion : Its Evolution and Es- 
sence 129 



vn 



PART I 

HUXLEY AND SCIENTIFIC 
AGNOSTICISM 

" Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not 
quickened, except it die." 



HUXLEY AND SCIENTIFIC 
AGNOSTICISM 1 

I do not think I can, at the beginning 
of this new academic year, better minister 
to your spiritual needs than by inviting 
you, in the solemn calm of this time and 
place, to reflect for an hour with me upon 
the vital doctrines of the distinguished 
investigator and thinker who during the 
summer has been snatched by death from 
the ranks of science, of which for more than 
a third of a century he has been a fruitful 
cultivator, a doughty defender, and an il- 
lustrious ornament. It was on Saturday, 
June 29th, that Professor Huxley passed 
away, encountering the great mystery 
which closes the continuous mystery of 
life a few weeks after filling out the psalm- 
ist's measure of threescore years and ten. 
His death is a severe, and but for his work 

1 An address delivered before the students of Cor- 
nell University, Sunday evening, November 3, 1895. 
3 



4 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

it would be an irreparable, loss to the re- 
public of thought and science, And, in 
voicing the sincere regret we all feel at 
the removal of this brilliant and devoted 
worker for the enlargement and defence 
of human knowledge, I desire, while dis- 
charging what you will perhaps permit me 
to regard as a corporate trust, to express, 
if it is not presumptuous, my personal ap- 
preciation of his abilities and attainments 
and my respect for the integrity of his 
character, the nobility of his aims, and 
the apostolic zeal and earnestness with 
which he devoted himself to the work of 
his life. I embrace this opportunity the 
more eagerly as I am constrained to dissent 
from some of Huxley's views. 

Thomas Henry Huxley was born on the 
4th of May, 1825. His early education 
was somewhat irregular. While still a 
boy, he had a strong desire to be a mechan- 
ical engineer ; and, if his architectonic ge- 
nius, clear intellect, and enthusiastic and 
aggressive energy had been enlisted in the 
engineering profession, it is impossible to 
say what he might not have achieved ; but 
I much doubt if the modern world, whose 
civilization is nourished by heat, would 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 5 

still be guilty of the stupid and wanton 
waste of nine tenths of the energy stored 
up in coal for the purpose of making the 
remaining tenth available. But it was 
not destined that Huxley should solve 
this still unsolved problem. At an early 
age he entered upon the study of medicine, 
and in the first M.B. examination at the 
University of London he took honors in 
anatomy and physiology. His taste for 
engineering did not leave him ; the arena 
for its exercise was merely shifted from the 
inorganic macrocosm to the organic micro- 
cosm, — from nature to the living body. 
He cared little about medicine as the art 
of healing ; the only subject in his pro- 
fessional course which really and deeply 
interested him was physiology, — and phys- 
iology conceived as "the mechanical engi- 
neering of living machines." With the 
genius of a Watt or Edison he set him- 
self to work out the unity of plan in the 
structures of the innumerable throngs of 
diverse living beings and the modifications 
made in the same fundamental mechanism 
to serve diverse ends. Fortune favored 
his tastes and ambition. The captain of 
Her Majesty's ship Rattlesnake, which had 



6 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

been ordered to make a surveying voyage 
in the southern seas, wanted for assistant 
surgeon a man who knew something of 
science ; and through the influence of Sir 
John Richardson, the distinguished natu- 
ralist and Arctic explorer, Huxley was 
given the appointment. For more than 
four years — from 1846 to 1850 — he stud- 
ied in Nature's great biological laboratory, 
as Darwin and Hooker had done before 
him, spending most of his time on the 
coasts of Australia and New Guinea. 
The communications he sent home won 
him a reputation in the scientific world ; 
and in 1851 he was elected a Fellow of the 
Royal Society. He now desired to obtain 
a professorship of either Physiology or 
Comparative Anatomy ; but he was unsuc- 
cessful in all his applications. With his 
friend Tyndall, he turned his eyes to the 
New World; but the University of To- 
ronto, in which at the same time they be- 
came candidates for the vacant chairs of 
Physics and Natural History, " would not 
look at either " of them. In 1854, how- 
ever, Sir Henry De la Beche, the Director- 
General of the Geological Survey, offered 
Huxley the post of Palaeontologist and Lect- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 7 

urer on Natural History which Forbes had 
just resigned in the Royal School of Mines 
in order to accept the chair of Natural His- 
tory in Edinburgh University. Huxley 
was divided between his allegiance to 
physiology and his desire for the profes- 
sorship. He frankly told Sir Henry that 
he did not care for fossils and that he 
would give up Natural History as soon as 
he could get a chair of Physiology. But, 
as General Grant said, on publishing his 
Memoirs after having determined never 
to write anything for publication : " There 
are but few important events in the affairs 
of men brought about by their own choice." 
Not only did Huxley become Lecturer on 
Natural History, but he held the office for 
thirty-one years ; and of his scientific work 
a large part is palseontological ! Indeed, 
he took the whole field of zoology for his 
province ; and it is the verdict of Haeckel 
that he was the foremost zoologist in Eng- 
land. This is not the place to describe his 
volumes or even to mention his celebrated 
memoirs. After the publication of the 
" Origin of Species," his investigations 
were largely guided by the Darwinian 
hypothesis, of which his results formed 



8 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

a striking and substantial verification. 
While his research embraced both verte- 
brate and invertebrate life, he gave special 
attention to the structure and functions of 
vertebrate animals and he won renown by 
his brilliant elucidations of the intricacies 
of their mechanism. His growing fame 
procured him membership and office in 
many learned institutions and scientific 
associations ; and in 1883 he was crowned 
with the highest official distinction to 
which a British scientist can aspire, the 
presidency of the Royal Society, — of 
which for ten years he had been the sec- 
retary. In 1885 he resigned his profes- 
sorship (at sixty, he used to say, every 
scientific man " should commit the happy 
despatch ") and all his other official posts, 
and soon afterwards removed from Lon- 
don to Eastbourne. But, though he had 
well earned the ease and quiet of retire- 
ment, it is the last decade of his life which 
is notably marked by those divagations 
into politics, ethics, and especially theol- 
ogy, which made Huxley's name one of 
the best known in current literature. 
These incursions were often resisted, but 
such was the advantage of his controver- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 9 

sial position and his skill in attack and 
defence that he was seldom worsted and 
never vanquished, though he had among 
his adversaries some of the subtlest dis- 
putants in the English-speaking world. 

For Huxley was not merely a seeker of 
truth, he was her knight and sworn cham- 
pion, her defender and her advocate. To 
carry the " platform " of science with the 
" intelligent electors " of the commonwealth 
was, I think, his dearest ambition. But 
he would have been as good a champion 
of any other "platform" which he had 
once accepted with that intense intel- 
lectual impulsiveness he inherited from 
his mother. Indeed, I suspect that the 
Genius which presides over the nativity 
of Englishmen may have intended him for 
leader of the opposition to Her Majesty's 
government in the House of Commons ; 
but the accident of a "medical brother- 
in-law " made him a biologist ; and so 
it happened that the combativeness, the 
genius for debate, the skill in attack and 
defence, the courage and audacity, and all 
the splendid fighting qualities with which 
Nature had endowed this ardent and icon- 
oclastic radical were destined to find a 



10 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

field of activity in the advocacy of scien- 
tific knowledge and the defiance and de- 
nunciation of conventional Christianity. 
He says himself that he could not count 
even his scientific attainments and honors 
" as marks of success if I could not hope 
that I had somewhat helped that move- 
ment of opinion which has been called the 
New Reformation." He dearly loved a 
tilt with the ecclesiastical opponents of this 
progressive theology. And not even in 
the British Parliament was there a more 
formidable controversialist in England. 
Always courteous, he had at command the 
resources of ridicule and sarcasm ; warmly 
devoted to truth, he possessed an unerring 
sense for falsehood and error ; master of a 
lucid and trenchant style, a skilful dia- 
lectician, and a wonderful adept in the art 
of luminous explanation and popular ex- 
position, he was at home in science, he 
had travelled the highways of modern 
philosophy and literature, and, as Burke 
said of Charles Townshend, he knew how 
to bring together, within a short time, all 
that was necessary to establish, to illus- 
trate, and to decorate that side of the 
question he supported. Nor was this all. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 11 

The strong atmosphere of debate and con- 
tention was to Huxley like the air of the 
sea or mountain. His zest in the pursuit 
of knowledge was never quite so keen as 
when the game led across the enemy's pre- 
serve. He had, indeed, the idealist's faith 
that truth would prevail, but he delighted 
to abound in militant works for the re- 
moval of obstacles that impeded her victo- 
rious march. Darwin passed his life in 
serene contemplation and studious investi- 
gation of nature, interrupted only by the 
thrill of fresh insight and the ecstasy of 
new discoveries. Huxley liked research 
too ; but he cared more for the general 
acceptance of the results achieved by 
scientists, and his chief delight was in 
compelling the public to assent to them, 
unless, as one might sometimes suspect, 
he derived still greater satisfaction from 
confuting pretentious critics and ruth- 
lessly exposing their ignorance. It is 
this missionary spirit which distinguished 
Huxley from all the scientists of his gen- 
eration. He was the great apostle of the 
modern gospel of science. And as he had 
the preacher's earnestness in proclaiming 
this evangel and the controversialist's de- 



12 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

termination to make it prevail, so he had 
the dogmatist's immovable confidence that 
his creed was the only orthodox doctrine, 
and that it was destined to overcome all 
rival dogmas as the rod of Moses swal- 
lowed up the rods of the lesser magicians. 
He was of the same breed as the theolo- 
gians he assailed. It matters not that 
theirs was the faith once delivered to the 
saints and his the creed gradually elabo- 
rated by the scientists. In his temper 
and mental habit, in his attitude towards 
what he believed the truth, Huxley was as 
veritable a dogmatist as any of his theo- 
logical antagonists, though they banned 
what he blessed and though he was neither 
of Paul or Peter, but heartily wished a 
plague on both their houses. A scientist 
by profession and achievement, but in- 
wardly a theological iconoclast, it is not 
strange that, with his gifts and under the 
stimulus of favoring circumstances, Hux- 
ley should have become the most distin- 
guished protagonist in the fierce scientific 
and theological controversies of his gener- 
ation. He was still a young man — only 
thirty-four years of age — when the bitter 
warfare began in which for the remaining 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 13 

half of his life he drank delight of battle 
with his peers, 

" Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." 

The signal and the occasion of the im- 
pending storm was the appearance, in 1859, 
of Darwin's " Origin of Species." The 
tempest which this work aroused in the 
intellectual world was without a parallel 
since the time when Galileo, whom (sad 
irony of fate!) the youthful Milton found 
blind and a prisoner of the Inquisition, 
had revolutionized the thought of Chris- 
tendom by inaugurating the Copernican 
astronomy. The Prospero who, in his 
innocency, had conjured up this storm 
was "a modest, retiring, diffident country 
gentleman, peaceful as a Quaker, dreading 
controversy, avoiding society, and devot- 
ing his entire energy (whenever a fragile 
constitution permitted him to labor) to 
harmless observation of the ways of plants 
and animals and innocent reflection upon 
the mode of their development. This 
interpreter of nature was distinguished 
for his caution, his patience, and, above 
all, his fair-mindedness. Now, as a result 
of his study and meditation, he had come 



14 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

to the conclusion that biological species, 
which had hitherto passed for immutable 
creations, were the slowly consolidated 
growths of changing varieties. The fer- 
ment which Darwin thus cast into the 
mass of current beliefs was in its logical 
essence identical with Galileo's e pur si 
muove. The astronomer asserted that the 
earth moved; the biologist that species 
changed. But Darwin was more than a 
modern Heracleitus championing the her- 
esy of flux in opposition to the orthodox 
tradition of fixity as the law of the organic 
world. Others, too, had dreamt of the 
natural transmutation of species as an 
alternative to the miracle of creation. 
Darwin endeavored to turn the dream into 
a demonstration. His is the peculiar 
glory of actually showing, by analogy of 
the selective breeding practised by hor- 
ticulturists and agriculturists, how the 
variations in the species of plants and 
animals which are constantly turning up 
are, under the influence of what he called 
Natural Selection, preserved, and then 
transmitted with modifications to de- 
scendants, until by successive accumula- 
tions they are consolidated into species 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 15 

entirely distinct from the original forms. 
Man has made new varieties of the horse, 
of the pigeon, of the rose, — so distinct 
that a naturalist from another planet 
would describe them as different species, 
— by the simple method of breeding 
exclusively from the individuals which 
happened to possess the characteristics 
desired. In the formation of true spe- 
cies, the struggle for life takes the place 
of man's selective action, with the result 
that, while in the competition ill-favored 
varieties are exterminated, those organ- 
isms possessing modifications beneficial 
to themselves, those which are "fittest" 
in the given environment, survive, and, as 
in the case of cultivated plants and domes- 
ticated animals, they perpetuate their pe- 
culiarities until, in the course of many 
generations, there emerges the result of 
new and distinct species. 

Such is the essence of Darwinism, or 
the doctrine of the origin of species. Like 
all great and fruitful theories, it is simple 
enough when once pointed out. Every 
naturalist was already familiar with the 
facts of variability, of the struggle for 
existence, of adaptation to environment, 



16 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

and of the inheritance of parental charac- 
teristics. But no one before Darwin sus- 
pected that, by a new collocation of these 
well-known phenomena, a scientific solu- 
tion might be found for the mysterious 
problem of the origination of species. In a 
short time the leaders, and before long the 
rank and file, of zoologists, botanists, and 
palaeontologists accepted the Darwinian 
doctrine, at least as a working hypothesis. 
The only alternative was the belief in the 
creation of species ; but as the Creator is 
the first cause of all things, and science 
seeks second or intermediary or natural 
causes, it was really no scientific expla- 
nation to say that species were created. 
Darwinism assumed no causes but such 
as could be proved to be actually at work. 
It had, therefore, the essential requisite 
of every scientific hypothesis. Whether 
it was adequate to explain the fact of the 
rise of species was another matter. And, 
for one, Huxley, while accepting the hy- 
pothesis, showed that its logical founda- 
tion was incomplete so long as the vari- 
eties produced by selective breeding were, 
while true species were not, more or less 
fertile with one another. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 17 

It is not for me to express an opinion on 
the validity of the Darwinian theory. I 
suppose, however, that no naturalist would 
now deny that within certain limits new 
species are originated by the survival and 
consolidation of such variations, spontane- 
ously arising in organisms, as may be use- 
ful to their possessors in the struggle for 
life. Assuming, therefore, Darwinism to 
be true, I trust I may be permitted to ob- 
serve that the origin of species remains 
almost as much a mystery as ever, though 
the mystery has been thrown a stage 
further back. Organisms differentiating 
themselves continuously along particular 
lines for indefinite periods of time must, 
under the law of the survival of the fittest, 
infallibly give rise to new species. But 
pray observe that the survival of the fittest 
does not account for the arrival of the fittest. 
That self -evolving organism, on which the 
entire issue is dependent, is a miracle which 
no naturalist has as yet transmuted into 
science. Natural Selection — a struggle 
for life and survival of the fittest — 
simply sifts the material furnished by the 
variability of plants and animals. The 
question then arises by what agency those 



18 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

variations are originated, shaped, and con- 
tinued so that they are capable of produc- 
ing those specific forms which, under the 
sifting of natural selection, actually emerge. 
Darwin himself was not insensible to the 
heavy weight of this unexplained mystery. 
In a letter to Huxley, written November 
25, 1859, he expressed his perplexity con- 
cisely and aptly, though somewhat pro- 
fanely, in the following query: " What the 
devil determines each particular variation? 
What makes a tuft of feathers come on 
a cock's head, or moss on a moss-rose?" 
If Darwin explained the appearance of new 
species, he did not explain the emergence 
of this differentiation of the organism — 
much less the origin of the organism itself 
— from which new species take their rise. 
The " Origin of Species " is, in fact, not 
the Genesis but the Exodus of living forms. 
It tells how~ a chosen seed, having been led 
out of the house of bondage, — the bondage 
to ancestral type, — waged a long struggle 
against the inhospitality of its environment 
and the attacks of its rivals, until at length 
it reached the promised goal, — the stature 
of an independent race, the transmutation 
into a new species. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 19 

One thing, however, is indisputable. 
The Darwinian hypothesis clearly belonged 
to the realm of science. If ever there was 
a passionless and abstract theory, Darwin's 
doctrine of the origination of species would 
seem to have deserved that characterization . 
And certainly no one but a master in the 
biological sciences should have presumed 
to estimate the validity, or fix the limits, 
of a theory resting on such a mass of ob- 
servations, and sustained by so many lines 
of converging evidence, as those which 
Darwin brought to the support of the 
theory of Natural Selection. But oftenest 
the unexpected happens, — and this time 
the unwarranted. The ignorance, bigotry, 
and blind passion of the mob who con- 
demned Socrates now took the judgment- 
seat for the hearing of Darwin. Dragged 
from the study and the laboratory into 
the garish light of public notoriety, his 
scientific hypothesis became the scandal of 
parlors and the ridicule of clubs, while 
press, platform, and pulpit thundered with 
a confused turmoil of refutation and in- 
vective, in which were mingled outrageous 
denunciations of the simple naturalist him- 
self as a dangerous, godless, and even de- 



20 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

generate member of the human species. 
But if unthinking orthodoxy and prim pro- 
priet} r were horrified, free-thinking radi- 
calism went mad with delight. She wildly 
clasped Darwinism to her bosom as the 
hopeful parent of infidelity, materialism, 
and atheism. What with friends and foes, 
the plain craft of science had never before 
got between such a Scylla and Charybdis! 
But why all this public interest in the 
new theory of organic species, you will ask ? 
The mass of people, we all know, are not 
as a rule much concerned about abstract 
inquiries. Quite true ; and I will say at 
once that it was not Darwin's theory of the 
origin of species which convulsed society, 
but the inferences, deductions, and associ- 
ated ideas which that theory suggested 
concerning matters of vital and permanent 
interest to humanity. Human reason de- 
clares that God is the ground of the uni- 
verse, and the moral and religious sense 
gives assurance that He is the Father of our 
spirits. Now this primary belief, — " in the 
beginning, God," — this datum of con- 
sciousness as I may call it, has, in the lapse 
of many Christian centuries, become insep- 
arably entwined with a venerable tradition 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 21 

of creation, according to which species were 
instantaneously originated, immutably 
fixed, and permanently distinguished. Read 
once more the beautiful legend with which 
the Bible opens, — a legend so poetically 
vivid that Darwin's contemporaries still 
took it for history, as men devoid of culture 
and literary feeling do to this day, — read 
this story, I repeat, and you will see that the 
writer conceives of the species of plants and 
animals as sudden and unchangeable crea- 
tions, with metes and bounds for each, and 
an impassable chasm between man and every 
other species. This legendary account of 
the genesis of things had, unfortunately, 
embosomed itself, not only in theology, but 
in the religious thought and feeling of 
Christendom. And when the " Origin of 
Species " appeared, the church had not yet 
recovered from the rude shock administered 
to the orthodox belief in impulsive crea- 
tions by the uniformitarian geology of 
Lyell's "Principles." In sheer self-defence, 
therefore, religious minds felt impelled to 
attack the evolutionary biology which Dar- 
win proclaimed and, still more, the revo- 
lutionary anthropology which loomed up 
behind it. If species were not immutable, 



22 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

if related species were co-descendants of 
the same ancestors, then man and the apes 
— oh, unutterable horror! You smile at 
the mention, or even at the suggestion, of 
the pithecoid origin of mankind! But it 
was a stone of stumbling to able and de- 
vout men of the last generation. What, 
they asked, would become of the soul, of 
sin, of the atonement, — nay, of the Creator 
Himself thus discharged of so much of 
the activity hitherto imposed upon Him ? 
It was, indeed, an awful crisis of thought. 
And the travail and pathos of it will 
long be remembered. But you who look 
back on it, as to a remote period, with 
the fresh eyes of youth, will not miss 
the comic by-play that mingled with the 
tragedy. You will see society divided into 
two heraldic camps, one battling for an 
ancestor a little lower than the angels and 
the other for an ancestor a little higher 
than the apes. You will see cool men lose 
their heads, and men of good breeding part 
with their manners, and men not hitherto 
conspicuous for piety suddenly grown jeal- 
ous about the honor of the Lord of Hosts. 
And all the while it is forgotten that man 
is what he is howsoever he came to be what 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 23 

he is, and that in God all things live and 
move and have their being, though His 
children are forever misreading the way 
in which He does His wondrous works. 

It was all over with science ! In this 
fierce and indiscriminate polemic, the Dar- 
winian hypothesis retreated from view be- 
fore the spectres which it had evoked in 
the imagination of the excited disputants 
and the terrified public. The theory of 
the origination of species by natural se- 
lection was a generalization addressed to 
naturalists ; but instead of receiving a 
dispassionate examination at the hands of 
experts, it became the occasion of a free 
fight over the entire area of that No Man's 
Land which lies between modern Science 
and traditional Theology. One party ap- 
pealed to the sure word of revelation, the 
other to the inerrant record of nature. 
The points of issue were not clearly de- 
fined ; their number multiplied as the bit- 
terness of the disputants increased ; and 
in time Darwinism became identified with 
a mass of biological, psychological, ethical, 
metaphysical, and theological speculations, 
having little or nothing in common but a 
genetic or historical method of treatment, 



24 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

and a content marked by opposition to 
current belief and orthodox Christianity. 
Huxley at an early stage descended into 
this arena with alacrity and keen delight. 
Darwin gave him the sobriquet of " My 
General Agent." He became the leader 
of the radical hosts. While retaining his 
speculative doubt of Darwin's biological 
hypothesis, he was the head and front of 
the Darwinians. I have already described 
his splendid controversial powers ; I may 
say here that he was too good a debater, 
too intense a partisan, too strong a hater, 
to put himself sympathetically at the 
standpoint of his opponents, and lead 
them by kindly tact and timely sugges- 
tion of higher truth out of the bondage 
of error in which he believed them be- 
nighted captives. His militant spirit was 
too strong for his pedagogical instinct. 
His genius was not constructive, but icon- 
oclastic. He delighted to dare, to defy, 
to destroy; in dealing with persons not 
of his way of thinking, his aim was less 
instruction than refutation; and I sup- 
pose nothing gave him greater pleasure 
than to cleave an antagonist with the 
sword of his logic, unless it was to be- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 25 

wilder him with the rapier of his irony. 
I do not, of course, mean to disparage the 
value of discussion. My point is merely 
that, if Huxley could have had more sym- 
pathy with the Philistines, his arguments, 
though losing something of their point 
and dash, would have gained in illumina- 
tion, efficacy, and fruitfulness. But one 
must take him as he was ; and it was the 
nature of his analytic genius to revel in 
antinomies, and the method of his debate 
was to impale antagonists between the 
horns of an " either — or." Let us, how- 
ever, not forget that besides the thesis and 
antithesis of the controversialist, there is 
the synthesis of the comprehensive thinker, 
and that the " either — or" of angry de- 
bate is often cancelled by the "both — and" 
of calm reflection. Whether the issues 
between Huxley and his adversaries may 
be so resolved, we must now proceed to 
consider. 

I think that the many litigious suits in 
which Huxley was engaged as advocate 
for natural knowledge may all be em- 
braced in three categories, which, though 
related, we may nevertheless clearly dis- 
tinguish. First of all, there is the case 



26 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

of Science versus Revelation ; secondly, 
the case of Evolution versus Creation ; 
and, thirdly, the case of Pithecus or the 
Ape versus Adam. The first of these 
cases engrossed the latter years of his 
life ; the other two claimed his attention 
at the outbreak of the war over Darwin- 
ism. The three, taken together, afforded 
abundant scope for the exhibition of that 
mental attitude which Huxley first desig- 
nated Agnosticism. And though his creed 
as an Agnostic was not exhausted either 
in idea or in fact by his views on these 
disputed points, these were the only as- 
pects of it which he ever fully developed, 
or in which he seemed sincerely and in- 
tensely interested. I shall have to allude 
to other elements of the Agnostic faith 
hereafter. Meantime let us see how the 
eponymous Agnostic filled his role in 
those vital contests between popular be- 
lief and evolutionary science to which I 
have just referred. It will be convenient 
to begin with the case of Evolution versus 
Creation. 

That God is the ultimate ground and 
source of all things, whether they be liv- 
ing or inert, thinking or unthinking, seems 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 27 

to me not merely a conclusion reached by 
reflection and inference, but an intuitive 
belief constitutive of intelligence itself. 
Man, because he is rational, must believe 
in God as Universal First Cause ; atheism 
is, in the strictest sense of the term, irra- 
tional. Science, however, is in quest, not 
of the ultimate ground and reason of exist- 
ence, but of the so-called secondary causes, 
— the proximate agencies and circum- 
stances, — by which things have been mod- 
ified in the natural order of events. It is, 
therefore, not an explanation of the scien- 
tific order to say that species of animals 
and plants were created by God. The 
proposition may be perfectly true and 
yet, in connection with science, totally 
irrelevant. What the biologist seeks to 
discover is the sequence of the natural 
phenomena by which it has been brought 
about that species have become what they 
are. And for the definite purpose, the 
limited inquiry, which science sets before 
itself as the goal of its endeavor, it mat- 
ters not — I say it with no feeling of irrev- 
erence — whether there be a Creator or 
not. If proximate causes, if natural agen- 
cies, cannot be found to account for the 



28 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

origination of species, the problem for the 
man of science is unsolved, and it may be 
insoluble ; but in any event, the case is 
not helped from the scientific point of 
view by the theory of supernatural crea- 
tion. If it be true that all kinds of life 
came into existence instantaneously, by 
the mere fiat of the Divine Will, then this 
fact, instead of affording an alternative 
explanation to the biologist, carries the 
problem which he had raised out of the 
field of science altogether. Science stops 
where the sequence of natural events in 
time is broken by a supernatural occur- 
rence. Science is simply the record of the 
behavior of things under the established 
order ; neither her method nor her appa- 
ratus enables her to go beyond these limits ; 
and when Omnipotence comes upon the 
scene, she is smitten with impotence. Only 
there are such good reasons for faith in the 
continuity of natural causation that no one 
can be expected to believe, without the 
strongest evidence, in a breach due to the 
miracle of supernatural agency. 

How, then, stands the case with the origi- 
nation of species ? Men of science may be 
prejudiced in favor of an explanation by 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 29 

natural causation, for it is their business 
to seek secondary causes ; but if, as a 
matter of fact, species were miraculously 
and instantaneously created by God, there 
would be nothing for biology to do but to 
accept the fact and confine its inquiries to 
the behavior of the organisms which had 
thus come supernaturally upon the field. 
But we do not know that living forms 
were thus originated. It was, no doubt, 
the universal belief before Darwin. But 
that belief had no other basis than the bib- 
lical account of creation ; and we have now 
learned that, whatever else the Bible may 
do for us, it was never intended to teach 
us science. Indeed the very conception of 
science — derived, as it is, from the Greeks 
— was foreign to the Hebrew mind. If 
you read the Old Testament with the 
slightest degree of attention, you will see 
that none of the writers has any notion of 
that order of nature and system of sec- 
ondary causes which it is the function 
of science to interpret. On the contrary, 
they conceive of God as the direct and 
immediate cause of all natural phenomena. 
"The God of glory thundereth ; " "the 
voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars ; " 



30 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

" the voice of the Lord shaketh the wilder- 
ness ; " " the voice of the Lord maketh the 
hinds to calve ; " " the Lord sitteth upon 
the flood ; yea, the Lord sitteth King for- 
ever." These quotations are from a psal- 
mist, it is true; but neither in poet or 
prophet, chronicler or historian, will you 
discover any hint of nature as an inter- 
mediary system of relatively independent 
agencies ; and, the more fervid the inspira- 
tion of the writer, the more intensely does 
he picture all sublunary changes as doings 
of the Lord of Hosts. Ultimately consid- 
ered, this interpretation seems to me to be 
true, eternally true. But it is a verity 
with which science has no concern. On 
the other hand, as I have said already, the 
Hebrew race had no genius for that exact 
and systematic knowledge of natural phe- 
nomena which is the desideratum of the 
scientific inquirer. When, therefore, this 
profound, but unscientific, people began to 
brood over the mysterious problem of the 
origin of things, they grasped, with a clear- 
ness that has never been excelled, the 
great and precious truth that God is the 
creative source of the world ; but when 
they proceeded to describe the procession 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 31 

of natural phenomena — the breaking of 
light on chaos, the formation of the globe, 
and the appearance of living creatures, 
"each after his kind" — they were so far 
from anticipating the discoveries of modern 
science that their only aim was to adorn 
the truth of reason with the poetry of a 
naive but sublime phantasy, for which they 
sketched a succession of pictures which 
still have potency to subdue the imagina- 
tion and attune the emotions like the 
stately overture to an oratorio. 

It is perfectly obvious to-day — or it 
should be — that if you would know the 
history of organisms you must consult the 
testimony of the fossiliferous rocks. It 
was very different when Huxley began his 
investigations. Everybody then supposed 
it was enough to consult the Book of Gen- 
esis. It became Huxley's duty, as a man 
of science, to show that the two records 
did not agree. And he accomplished the 
task, which it must be owned he found far 
from uncongenial, with an array of evi- 
dence and a cogency of demonstration 
which convinced everybody except his 
discomfited antagonists and the invincible 
torturers of the Hebrew text. Huxley 



32 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

professed to have a perfectly open mind 
towards the two records, to have no preju- 
dice one way or the other ; and he declared 
that the view which he accepted was com- 
mended solely by the conclusiveness of the 
evidence in its favor. Perhaps he deceived 
himself; perhaps he was influenced, to 
some extent, at least, by his way of look- 
ing at things in general — what Mr. Bal- 
four has since called the "psychological 
climate." But Huxley was certainly not 
conscious of any such distracting cause of 
belief. In relation to the conflict between 
the creational and the evolutional doctrine 
of the origin of species, he conceived his 
mind as a freely acting balance, which, 
however moved, was moved solely by the 
weight of the evidence adduced. And 
this hospitality and loyalty of the mind 
to evidence, with the putting away of au- 
thority, tradition, and every other cir- 
cumstance, is what Huxley means by the 
Agnosticism of the man of science. 

I have hitherto spoken of the case of 
Evolution versus Creation solely from the 
point of view of biology. Huxley's con- 
tention is that, as concerns the time, order, 
and manner in which living kinds came 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 33 

into existence, the stratified rocks tell one 
story and the Book of Genesis another. 
But Huxley (putting aside the colossal 
blunder of Bathybius, which he frankly 
acknowledged) has nothing to say of the 
first beginning of those primordial species 
from whose varieties other species may 
subsequently have been formed. And, of 
course, as a biologist, he was under no 
temptation to account for the origin of the 
inorganic world or of the realm of con- 
scious minds. It is conceivable, indeed, 
that the universe is eternal ; but, if so, 
reflection shows that neither now nor at 
any other moment could it exist without 
the sustaining energy of the Divine Voli- 
tion ; and Goethe finely calls it " the liv- 
ing garment of God." But, however it 
be with the universe, it is a certainty of 
science that at one time there was neither 
life nor consciousness on this globe. To 
the man of science their emergence must 
be a miracle, for it is a violation of the 
law of natural causation. The religious 
mind calls it a creation. Evolutionary 
science would have accomplished its goal 
only if it could show that life had devel- 
oped from inorganic matter, and mind 



34 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

from unconscious life. From the primi- 
tive nebula of the universe to man who 
knows it> the chain of evolution would 
then be complete. There would be no 
break in what Huxley described as "Nat- 
ure's great progression, from the formless 
to the formed — from the inorganic to the 
organic — from blind force to conscious 
intellect and will." But science has not 
realized this ideal; and it is probably 
unrealizable. This is doubtless a great 
comfort to the general public. Were the 
realization ever achieved, many pious 
minds, who can see God only when He 
breaks in on the order of natural causa- 
tion, would have to walk by faith ; and I 
fear, in the absence of sight, the light 
would seem dim indeed. Yet a primitive 
chaos of star-dust, which held in its womb 
not only the cosmos that fills space, not 
only the living creatures that teem upon 
it, but also the intellect that interprets it, 
the will that confronts it, and the con- 
science that transfigures it, must as cer- 
tainly have God at the centre as a universe 
mechanically arranged and periodically ad- 
justed must have Him at the circumference. 
There is no real antagonism between Cre- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 35 

ation and Evolution. The notion of Cre- 
ation implies the absolute beginning of 
existence; the notion of Evolution im- 
plies gradual and progressive change in 
that which already exists. Creation is 
not only in itself toto coelo different from 
Evolution; it is as much the prerequisite 
of Evolution as your bodily system is of 
digestion. Evolution is merely the mode 
in which, according to modern science, 
God manifests Himself alike in the world 
of nature and in the world of spirit. His 
procedure is not by spasms and cataclysms ; 
but here a little, there a little, and ever 
gradually onward. 

I wonder what posterity will make of 
the confusion which the law of evolution 
caused in the minds of the generation 
which in the nineteenth century first 
discovered conclusive evidence of its 
operation ? They will surely learn with 
amazement and incredulity that the dis- 
covery was in high quarters supposed to 
be fatal to a belief in God, and that, what 
in old times the fool had said in his heart, 
was in that age proclaimed upon the house- 
tops as the final inference of science and 
philosophy. As though man's faith that 



36 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

Grod is could be shaken by a new glimpse 
of how God acts.' Surely it remains a 
necessary postulate of intelligence — a 
datum as reasonable and trustworthy as 

belief in the existence of anything what- 
soever — that God is the creative source 
and sustaining ground of the universe. 
— and that, whether He poured forth His 
energy at a definite then and there, or. as 
I believe, continues to diffuse it through 
every point of infinite space and to main- 
tain it at every moment of unending time. 

I must do Huxley the justice of explain- 
ing that his clear intellect was never 
obscured by the delusion that atheism 
was an inference from the theory of 
evolution. What he attacked was that 
venerable tradition of the process of 
creation, which had been so long ac- 
cepted as a part of religion itself ; and 
he attacked it for the good and sufficient 
reason that it was at variance with the 
facts revealed in the fossiliferous strata 
of the earth's crust. 

I have to some extent already touched 
upon Huxley's advocacy of the simian 
or pithecoid origin of man. I have des- 
ignated this issue the case of Pithecus 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 37 

versus Adam. Huxley considered the 
issue one of capital importance. His own 
attitude brought upon him criticism and 
ridicule, and not only those, but also ani- 
madversion and reproof; and for a time, 
as he long afterwards good-naturedly 
said, he was little better than one of 
the wicked. *But Huxley needed oppo- 
sition ; he liked fighting ; and this cru- 
sade was in the cause of truth. Indeed 
it is difficult to know how a fair-minded 
and honest biologist who saw so far could 
have forborne to say as much as Huxley 
set down in his famous pamphlet on 
" Man's Place in Nature." Science must 
needs be truthful, outright, and down- 
right. And Huxley was not the man to 
make his biographer blush, as Bacon had 
made Macaulay blush " for the disingen- 
uousness of the most devoted worshipper 
of speculative truth, for the servility of 
the boldest champion of intellectual free- 
dom." Herein Huxley is an admirable 
example to every student and thinker. 
The thing that is true may not be wel- 
come — for interests are entrenched be- 
hind what is current; but if you know 
it to be true — I am not speaking of 



38 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

guessing but of knowledge, and I say 
if you are sure you have ascertained the 
truth, in God's name speak it out and 
keep not silent! This is what Huxley 
did in regard to the question of man's 
relation to the animals next below him. 
Even before the appearance of " The 
Origin of Species " he had thought much 
of the structural affinities of men and 
apes ; and the views at which he had 
arrived were in full harmony with those 
which Darwin now proclaimed. " Man's 
Place in Nature " was finished in 1862. 
Taking account both of foetal develop- 
ment and adult structure, this work de- 
monstrated the most striking similarities 
between man and the man-like apes. In 
the processes of origination, in the early 
stages of formation, in the mode of nu- 
trition before and after birth, man's his- 
tory is identical with that of the apes; 
and in his developed structure the re- 
semblances with theirs are as striking 
as they are fundamental. After compar- 
ing their several organs with great care 
and exactitude, Huxley reached the con- 
clusion that the structural differences 
which separate man from the gorilla and 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 39 

the chimpanzee are not so great as those 
which separate the gorilla from the lower 
apes. And this leads directly to the con- 
clusion which so horrified Huxley's gen- 
eration. If animals of similar structure 
and function are ever descended from 
common ancestors, then there is no ra- 
tional ground for doubting, either that 
the human species might have origi- 
nated by differentiation from the simian, 
or that both are modified ramifications 
of a common ancestral stock. Now Dar- 
win's investigations prove that species do, 
sometimes at any rate, originate through 
modifications in the co-descendants of 
common ancestors. Accordingly, Huxley 
regarded the simian origin of man as 
highly probable. And it afforded in- 
tense satisfaction to his craving for scien- 
tific explanation to be able to trace the 
condition of the entire organic world, 
as Lyell had traced that of the inorganic, 
to the efficiency of causes still operating 
about us. 

There is, as I have already intimated, 
a feeling — I think I may say a conviction 
— among scientists of the present day 
that the Darwinian theory of descent 



40 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

with modifications has been pushed too 
far, and that corollaries have been drawn 
from it which a longer and more accurate 
acquaintance with the facts shows to be 
altogether unwarranted. Something like 
a reaction from earlier Darwinism seems 
now in full force. In time the limits of 
the new truth will be defined. Meanwhile 
we are in doubt and uncertainty. In 
striking contrast is Darwin's own assur- 
ance of man's descent from the lower 
animals. In the postscript to a letter to 
Lyell, written as early as January, 1850, 
he tells his friend that he has a " pleasant 
genealogy for mankind" ; and describes 
our remotest ancestor as an " animal which 
breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a 
great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, 
and was undoubtedly an hermaphrodite ! " 
Be it so ! Yet 

" A man's a man for a' that." 

If at the beginning he starts with the 
brute, and if at the end his body may 
return to the basest uses, still 'twere to 
consider too curiously to consider so, 
unless we also observed that this quin- 
tessence of dust is not only the paragon 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 41 

of animals, but the one self-conscious 
denizen of our world, noble in reason, 
infinite in faculty, in action like an angel, 
in apprehension like a God. Assume, I 
say, that Darwin's " pleasant genealogy 
for mankind" should pass muster with 
the herald's college of contemporary biol- 
ogy. What matters it that you have 
come from brutishness, if you are come to 
humanity? What matters it that your 
ancestor was an ape, if you are a man ? I 
ask not what you are derived from, but 
what you have arrived at ? The vital 
matter is not whether a man started at 
this point or at that, but, in the expressive 
slang of our day, whether he "got there." 
If you are conscious of the dignity and 
responsibility of human living, you will 
survey with indifference speculations con- 
cerning the origin of your race, knowing 
that you are not one whit the better or 
the worse whether it started with a fallen 
archangel or an exalted ape. Of course 
Lady Clara Vere de Vere might see peril 
to her "hundred coats-of-arms." But 
that in a democratic community like ours, 
where worth and not birth is the test of 
manhood, there should be an aversion to 



42 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

Darwin's doctrine of the descent of man 
as degrading to humanity, is a curious 
illustration of the tenacity with which 
sentiments survive the institutions and 
beliefs which made them appropriate, and 
live on even when they have become irra- 
tional and absurd. If men are to be 
judged, not by what they are, but by 
what they came from, not only biology, 
not only science, but common experience 
as well will force us to a complete revision 
of our estimate of mankind. If any one 
of us could trace his pedigree through a 
hundred generations, he would find at the 
other end a naked savage but little re- 
moved from the brutes. Nay, a short 
time ago and you yourself were merely a 
germ which no ordinary power of dis- 
crimination could distinguish from an 
incipient puppy. But these facts are 
neither degrading nor brutalizing to your 
humanity. They put on you no obliga- 
tion to scalp your neighbors, or to grovel 
on all fours. You are — -not what you 
have come from, but what you have become. 
And the knowledge of your lowly begin- 
nings should give you faith and hope 
in your capacity for still higher things. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 43^ 

There may be atavism, there may be re- 
version to primitive types ; but the general 
tendency of evolution being to fuller and 
better life, it is assuredly the destiny of 
man to 

" Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

No one knew this better than Huxley. 
Asserting, on the one hand, that no abso- 
lute line of demarcation could be drawn 
between the structure of man and the 
structure of the animals next below him, 
and holding that even the highest faculties 
of the human mind begin to germinate in 
lower forms of life, the evolutionary biol- 
ogist was also profoundly conscious of the 
vastness of the gulf between civilized man 
and the brutes, and he declared, in felici- 
tous and striking terms, that " whether 
from them or not, man is assuredly not of 
them." This Agnosticism does not touch 
the dignity or the spiritual vocation of 
man. True, Huxley did not, as he aptly 
put it, " base man's dignity upon his great 
toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an ape 
has a hippocampus minor." What he 
did was to raise a simple question of fact, 



44 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

namely, whether the human species did 
not strongly resemble the simian, and to 
suggest an explanation, namely, whether 
they might not have had a common origin. 
This is the meaning of Huxley's Agnosti- 
cism in relation to the question of the 
origin of man. At this distance of time 
nothing could seem more harmless or less 
disquieting. 

I have now examined the case of Evo- 
lution versus Creation and the case of 
Pithecus versus Adam. There remains, 
to complete our survey of the Agnosti- 
cism developed by Huxley, the case of 
Science versus Revelation. This issue I 
have to some extent already anticipated. 
The conflict between the evolutional and 
the creational theories of the origin of liv- 
ing beings, and particularly of man, is a 
part — and a part of great strategic im- 
portance — of the general warfare between 
Science and Revelation. To this com- 
prehensive issue itself I now briefly in- 
vite your attention. 

As ordinarily understood, Revelation 
gives us inerrant truth on infallible author- 
ity. Science yields provisional theories 
with no better warrant than uncontra- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 45 

dieted experience. At first sight Revela- 
tion might seem to be the more fruitful 
and trustworthy source of knowledge; 
and the ages of faith so regarded it. But 
ours is an epoch of criticism. We de- 
mand the grounds of belief ; we suffer no 
claims to pass on the plea of their sanc- 
tity or of their antiquity. In this work 
of criticism, the one sure standard is ex- 
perience. I use the word " experience " 
in the broadest possible sense ; and I say 
that the age of science which has super- 
vened upon the age of faith holds the 
experience of mankind to be the best and 
safest test of truth. We are not, how- 
ever, justified in rejecting everything that 
transcends the range of ordinary human 
experience. On the contrary, so far as 
we know, to-morrow may produce events 
which yesterday would have been mira- 
cles. It is not criticism, it is not science, 
but it is dogmatism of the most arrant 
type, to assert that miracles are impossible. 
What then should be the intellectual atti- 
tude of the candid inquirer in regard to 
assertions of miraculous occurrences which 
claim to be the sure word of Revelation — 
inerrant truth on infallible authority ? I 



46 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

answer unhesitatingly that, before giving 
his assent to those statements, such an 
inquirer must satisfy himself, first, that 
there is evidence sufficient to show that 
the events in question actually happened, 
and, secondly, that their occurrence is 
insusceptible of explanation on natural 
grounds. This would involve a close 
scrutiny of all-' the facts and circum- 
stances in connection with every reported 
miracle, for the purpose of ascertaining 
the evidential value of the whole. Nor 
would this be the end of the inquiry. 
Besides this specific examination in each 
case, it would be necessary to make a 
general canvass of the claims of Revela- 
tion as resting on infallible authority and 
furnishing inerrant truth. Appeals to 
antiquity, to authority, to tradition would 
have no more weight in the settlement of 
the question than a fair-minded judge 
might consider the equitable due of an- 
cient times, illustrious names, and sayings 
generally received. 

I say, then, that the miraculous occur- 
rences recorded in the Bible must be sub- 
jected to those tests before any critical in- 
quirer can be asked to accept or reject them. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 47 

Of course the natural events described by 
the sacred writers will be judged by the 
ordinary canons of historic credibility. 
In the light of these criteria, we may now 
ask what attitude our Agnostic scientist 
assumed in relation to the claims of Reve- 
lation. I can, I think, describe his posi- 
tion in a very few words. In the first 
place, Huxley finds that, while in some 
cases the sacred books of Revelation de- 
clare that certain events happened in a 
certain fashion, the secular books of Sci- 
ence prove that they did not. And, in 
the second place, Huxley finds that while, 
in other cases, the wonderful statements 
of the Bible are not contradicted by Sci- 
ence, they are not supported by inherent 
evidence sufficient to make them probable 
or credible. The total result is, both as 
regards historical events and supranatural 
occurrences, that the same liability to 
error and the same intrinsic improbabil- 
ity which we so readily recognize in the 
narratives of the sacred books of other 
peoples become the portion of our own 
Bible, which had hitherto, in almost uni- 
versal estimation, been Set apart by the 
notes of canonicity, inerrancy, and author- 



48 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

ity. Huxley bases his conclusion on an 
examination of typical specimens of the 
Old Testament and the New ; and in mak- 
ing his selections he showed a marked and 
constant predilection for what he called 
the "Noachian Deluge " and "the Bedevil - 
ment of the Gadarene Swine." For in- 
sistence on fact, for force of reasoning, for 
lucidity of style, for the unconventional 
way in which he treats theological sub- 
jects, for disregard of everything but 
what he believed the evidence in the 
case, and for the radical character of his 
results, Huxley, in these writings, was un- 
paralleled in his generation and in recent 
times finds a parallel in Strauss alone. I 
may add, too, that the very general ap- 
proval which the intelligent public ac- 
corded to Huxley's excursions into the 
realm of theology shows that the Eng- 
lish-speaking world had already entered 
into a new era of thought and culture — 
a critical era in which the barriers between 
theology and reason have been broken 
down, and the most venerable dogmas 
left to stand or fall with the evidence 
adduced to support them. 

Of course, the Bible contains myth and 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 49 

legend, allegory and fable, poetry and 
prose ; and it ought not to be surprising 
that critical science — historical and physi- 
cal — should discover errors in the sensu- 
ous setting of the supersensuous spiritual 
truth and life it was intended to reveal. 
Grant that none of the miracles reported 
in the Old Testament occurred, grant that 
many of the historical events were very 
different from what the records would 
naturally lead us to suppose ; still Israel's 
vision of a reign of righteousness on earth 
and in heaven is to this day verified in the 
soul of every good man who studies their 
laws and maxims or who communes with 
their psalmists and their prophets. Or 
look at the New Testament. What if the 
"Bedevilment of the Gadarene Swine," 
which proved such a stumbling-block to 
Huxley, never took place ; what if all 
the miraculous occurrences in the natural 
world recorded in the Gospels were the 
fantastic tribute of a pious generation, 
unskilled in the art of writing history and 
ignorant of the constancy of nature's laws, 
to a transcendent personality who com- 
manded their loyalty, touched all the 
springs of their affection, and thrilled their 



50 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

souls with a consuming sense of the inalien- 
able and indefeasible nearness of man to 
God ? Would not that miracle of miracles 
still remain, — Jesus of Nazareth, the won- 
der-worker of human history ? And would 
not the purpose of His coming — "I am 
come that ye might have life and that 
ye might have it more abundantly" — be 
fulfilled in the revelation He made, not 
only through His teachings but in His 
human life, both of the actual fatherliness 
of God and the potential divineness of 
man? These are spiritual truths which 
neither age can stale nor custom wither, 
which no science can disprove and no 
criticism discredit ; they are truths w^hich 
transcend both the order of nature and the 
secular history of humanity ; yet truths 
which, once revealed and incarnated by 
the divine " Son of Man," approve them- 
selves eternal verities to our religious 
intuition and feeling — that divining in- 
telligence 

" Whose kingdom is where time and space are not." 

I do not think that Christian faith 
should be shaken or disturbed by new 
interpretations of the Bible. That the 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 51 

essence of it is imperishable truth — truth 
of the spiritual order — the heart of man 
will perennially attest. Intrinsic falsity 
— what Plato called the lie in the soul — 
not even the veriest sceptic has asserted 
of the sacred writingSo But we have this 
treasure of spiritual truth in " earthen 
vessels." The scenes in space and events 
in time which represent it to one age of 
culture may misrepresent it to another. 
In the lapse of ages the portrayal may 
become a caricature. Whenever such a 
crisis arrives, men become so absorbed in 
destroying the trappings of truth that they 
lose sight of the majestic figure these were 
intended to set off and decorate. Your 
destructive critic is forever missing the 
eternal essence of truth in his pursuit of 
the changeable and perishable forms of its 
embodiment. Cosmogonical legends, di- 
dactic chronicles, wonderful stories of non- 
natural occurrences in nature, served to 
convey spiritual truth to earlier and more 
ignorant generations of mankind. But 
in themselves these things are devoid of 
spiritual efficacy. They are merely the 
bells to call primitive peoples to church. 
Sweet as the music they once made, mod- 



52 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

ern ears find them jangling and out of 
tune ; and their dissonant notes scare 
away pious souls who would fain enter 
the temple of worship. In the divinely 
ordered education of the race, man has 
progressed so far that he is now capable 
of apprehending in its purity that spirit- 
ual truth which was set forth to earlier 
generations in the forms of theophanies, 
miracles, and extraordinary scenes and 
occurrences. What the devout scholar 
and the devout scientist of modern times 
yearns for is, not the theology of Christ- 
endom, but the religion of Christ. That 
religion I call the absolute religion. It 
is not true because it is in the Bible ; it is 
in the Bible because it is eternally true. 
Its forms may change ; its embodiments 
may perish ; its records may pass away ; 
for all these belong to the world of sense 
and may fall a prey to the contingencies of 
time ; but the religion which Jesus lived 
and taught will endure as long as the 
human soul itself, which it is the glory of 
that religion to have bound indissolubly to 
its Divine Original. The Christian relig- 
ion, as a system of dogmatic theology, is 
already obsolescent (even in the churches, 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 53 

or in many of them, it is an alien and un- 
heeded survival) ; but the religion of Christ 
is still fresh with the dews of immortal 
youth and pregnant with abounding life 
to quicken the souls of all the children of 
men. Throughout Christendom there has 
been a recoil of men's minds from creed to 
personality. The evolution of our relig- 
ion brings us at the dawn of the twentieth 
century back to Christ Himself. 

It is at this point that Huxley's treat- 
ment of the Christian religion seems to 
me especially unsatisfactory. Evolutionist 
as he was, he overlooked the fact that both 
Christianity and the interpretation of its 
records are subject to the law of evolution. 
Now in theology, as in other provinces of 
inquiry, the idea of development has be- 
come the master light of all our seeing. 
In a world where everything changes and 
grows, where the mind of man enlarges, 
we naturally look for new experiences of 
religion, new conceptions of the Bible, 
and new expositions of doctrine. These 
changes are the phases of an evolving life, 
and, rightly considered, they witness to 
the inherent vitality of Christianity. If 
creeds are shifting, it is only that they 



54 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

may the better adjust themselves to that 
more correct interpretation of God's reve- 
lation to and in man which in the progress 
of the ages the human mind is continu- 
ously attaining to. Such a modification 
of creeds means the purification, simpli- 
fication, and rejuvenation of Christian 
theology. But Huxley read such trans- 
formations of dogma as the annihilation 
of theology. As though a man must re- 
pudiate Christianity because unable to 
accept the creed of his grandmother ! 
Huxley was led into this absurdity by 
the assumption (utterly foreign though 
it is to the spirit of modern scholarship) 
that if the Bible be not history, — a literal 
record and chronicle of events which act- 
ually happened, — it is not possible for us 
to have a Christian theology or, if I un- 
derstand him aright, even a Christian 
religion. A Christianity independent of 
time and place, eternally true, and veri- 
fied by every soul that finds it and which 
it finds, — a spiritual religion as indiffer- 
ent to history as it is to science, transcend- 
ing both, and holding the high places of 
the human spirit; this is something Hux- 
ley never dreamt of. Christianity must be 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 55 

" historical " in all its details or it is — 
illusion ! Nay, " Christian theology," he 
tells us in the controversial essay on " The 
Lights of the Church and the Light of Sci- 
ence," " must stand or fall with the histor- 
ical trustworthiness of the Jewish Script- 
ures." It is all up with Christianity, if 
those definite and detailed Old Testament 
narratives of apparently real events are not 
actually historical, — if the covenant with 
Abraham was not made, if circumcision 
was not ordained by Jehovah, if the deca- 
logue was not written by God's hand on 
the stone tables, if Abraham is more or less 
a mythical hero, the story of the deluge a 
fiction, that of the fall a legend, and that 
of creation the dream of a seer ! One 
would ordinarily say that, if these events 
are not historical, there is room in that 
great collection of books we call the Bible 
for other and higher forms of literary ex- 
pression than the sober chronicle of the 
historian; and that the truths of poetry, 
parable, and legend may be more important 
and fruitful for constructive theology than 
the truths of history. Not so Huxley. 
He will have nothing but history. And 
turning, in the essay on " Agnosticism and 



56 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

Christianity," to the New Testament, he 
lays bare its unhistorical features by dis- 
secting the story of the Gadarene swine, 
demonstrating its incredibility, and conse- 
quently bringing under suspicion all other 
stories of demoniac possession. But if the 
" demonological part of Christianity " be 
rejected, Huxley holds that the testimony 
of Jesus, who accepted that demonology, 
to the spiritual world — His declaration of 
the personality, fatherhood, and loving 
providence of God — will have been pro- 
foundly impaired, if it is not indeed ren- 
dered absolutely valueless. As Huxley put 
it in his rejoinder to Gladstone, entitled 
" The Keepers of the Herd of Swine," 
"the authority of the teachings of the 
Synoptic Gospels, touching the nature of 
the spiritual world, turns upon the accept- 
ance, or the rejection, of the Gadarene 
and other like stories." 

It is humiliating to think that the 
wretched pigs of Gadara may make or 
unmake our religious faith. For my own 
part, I cannot for a moment assent to 
such a view. And I have already ac- 
quainted you with some of the grounds 
which compel me to reject it. I will here 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM "57 

only illustrate my position by a reference 
to that book which men and women of Eng- 
lish speech are in the habit of mentioning 
next after the Bible — I mean, of course, 
the dramas of Shakespeare. Let me ask 
you to consider for a moment two of those 
plays, — " Hamlet' 9 and "Macbeth." In 
these dramas the actors are not all human 
beings ; witches and ghosts come upon 
the scene ; and to Shakespeare and his 
contemporaries these supernatural entities 
were (I presume) as real as the mundane 
characters. We have lost man's primitive 
faith in the existence of ghosts and witches. 
But "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" are as 
true and significant to us as they were to 
Shakespeare's contemporaries. As a rev- 
elation of the depths of human nature — 
of a soaring intellect and a paralyzed will, 
of the lust of power and an imagination 
that dallies with it while painting also 
the pangs of remorse — these plays have 
a worth and also a vitality unaffected by 
the place or time of their production, or 
even by the perishable elements entering 
into their composition. And you will not 
fail to note either that our estimation of 
the value of these plays, our appreciation 



58 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

of their meaning, and our participation in 
the author's insight are absolutely inde- 
pendent of any theories that may be 
formed concerning the life and character 
of Shakespeare. Indeed, while the dramas 
are the immortal heritage of our race, we 
know next to nothing of the dramatist. 

In the same way I apprehend that, if 
the Bible were annihilated, the religion of 
Christ would be approved and verified by 
the religious consciousness of Christen- 
dom. It was revealed that it might be 
received of men, and the historical revela- 
tion has now (may I not say ?) become the 
ideal possession of the human spirit. 

I think Huxley himself in his later 
years got a glimpse of the truth that the 
conflict between Science and Revelation 
was to be settled by the development of 
both. He came to recognize a certain 
class of inquirers as " scientific theolo- 
gians," whom he opposed to " counsels 
for creeds " — the advocates of " Clerical- 
ism" and " Ecclesiasticism." Those theo- 
logians he called " scientific," because they 
based their assertions, not on authority, 
but on evidence. Here the theologian 
and the scientist occupied common ground. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 59 

And Huxley could and did appreciate it. 
But I do not think Huxley ever recog- 
nized how much Revelation contained, 
and must contain, other than propositions 
addressed to the intellect. Its peculiar 
field is the emotions, and more particu- 
larly the moral and spiritual nature of 
man. In this field the watchword is not 
evidence, but inspiration ; the aim is not 
truth, but higher life. Huxley, with the 
fine frenzy for " natural knowledge " that 
possessed him throughout all his work 
and controversy, never realized how much 
of what is best in life lies outside that 
restricted territory. He sought, very 
properly, to expel from belief improbable 
stories of supernatural occurrences amid 
the regular flow of natural events ; but 
he never rose to the full height of the 
argument from which he might have sur- 
veyed natural causation as the expression 
of a Supernatural Mind in nature, and 
man — a being at once of sensibility and 
of rational and moral self -activity — as a 
signal and ever-present example of the 
interfusion of the natural with the super- 
natural in that part of universal existence 
nearest and best known to us. 



60 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

I have discussed this problem at too 
great length, and I must now hasten on. 
There remain two forms of Agnosticism 
yet to be mentioned in any adequate ac- 
count of Huxley. One of them we may 
call Metaphysical and the other Logical 
Agnosticism. The former X«pmst dismiss 
with a word. Huxley often alludes to it, 
but never attempts to establish or develop 
it. It is the dogma — the colossal dogma 
— that the human mind is incapable of 
apprehending God. A man who can in- 
telligently frame that proposition should 
be called not agnostic, but omniscient. 
For the doctrine means that God is of 
such a nature, and the human mind of 
such a make, that the two can never come 
together. Huxley picked up the tenet 
from an essay of Sir William Hamilton, 
which he read as a boy. And his boyish 
credulity remained with him to the end 
of his days. I have elsewhere 1 examined 
the doctrine, and must here content my- 
self with categorically rejecting it as " not 
proven." That the human mind is inca- 
pable of knowing anything of God, is a 
dogma that rests on no evidence whatever. 
1 See the next chapter. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 61 

The man who propounds it, whatever he 
may call himself, is the greatest dogmatist 
the world has ever seen. The philoso- 
phers who first set it forth deduced it 
from the premises — the false premises — 
which they inherited from one-sided sys- 
tems of thought. In Hume, it flows from 
an absurd sensationalism, in Kant, from 
an equally absurd rationalism, — both of 
them now happily obsolete. And Hume 
and Kant are the authorities whom Hux- 
ley invokes to support his theological 
nescience ! 

The only remaining phase of Agnosti- 
cism is what I have called Logical Agnos- 
ticism. This is not a creed of any kind, 
either positive or negative ; it asserts no 
tenet, and denies none ; it connotes an 
attitude of mind in dealing with evidence, 
" which is as much ethical as intellectual.'" 
It signifies candor, open-mindedness, and a 
resolute determination to believe what the 
facts warrant, neither more nor less. The 
doctrine that there are propositions which 
men ought to believe without logically 
satisfactory evidence, or (in Dr. New- 
man's words) that " religious error is, in 
itself, of an immoral nature," is abhorrent 



62 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

and shocking to the Agnostic. Agnosti- 
cism, in this sense, is synonymous with sci- 
entific method applied to every realm of 
inquiry. You will find Agnostics in lit- 
erature, history, theology, philosophy, and 
science. They bring existing beliefs to 
the test of fact, with the result of sus- 
pending, altering, or confirming our judg- 
ment of their validity. The Agnostic is 
a judge weighing evidence, a critic balanc- 
ing conflicting probabilities. 

This phase of Agnosticism is that in 
which Huxley delighted as a champion of 
intellectual liberty. With an air of superi- 
ority, perhaps pardonable under the cir- 
cumstances, he would fling it in the teeth 
of his creed-bound opponent, as though 
thanking God (if only there were a God) 
that he was not as other men or even as 
this poor " ecclesiastic. 5 ' But the fact is 
that Huxley missed the real point of dif- 
ference between himself and the " eccle- 
siastic." Both of them appeal alike to 
evidence ; both reason on the facts of 
the case in dispute. What distinguishes 
them is that the sort of evidence which 
convinces one, leaves the mind of the other 
unmoved. Their methods are the same ; 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 63 

they are both scientific, critical, or (if you 
will) agnostic ; and if they reach entirely 
different results, it is because the unex- 
pressed premises of their reasonings are 
different and perhaps contradictory. The 
fundamental assumptions that shape and 
color all thinking, the psychological cli- 
mate in which the intellect lives and 
works, the primal elements of character 
which remain below the threshold of con- 
sciousness, — these influence all our beliefs 
and reasonings, and in a Huxley and a 
Gladstone they present as wide diversities 
as any of the contrary theories these 
distinguished advocates ever espoused. 
Think, for example, of the impossibility 
of two intelligent, candid, and critical 
inquirers reaching similar conclusions on 
some religious dogma, when the bias, 
native or acquired, of the one mind is 
towards scientific naturalism, and that 
of the other towards ecclesiastical supra- 
naturalism. 

If, however, Huxley meant by Agnos- 
ticism the adoption of the scientific spirit 
and method, there is no investigator or 
thinker, whatever his creed, who would 
not to-day write himself down an Agnos- 



64 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

tic. One gets the impression, however, 
that Huxley's Agnostic must also be 
hostile to conventional Christianity. On 
this latter point I have already spoken to 
you, and I have no time here to enlarge 
upon the theme. As to the main issue 
now before us, I will only repeat that if 
Agnosticism means merely the candid 
examination and criticism of evidence, 
there is no one in this scientific age of 
the world who would disavow, no one 
who would not glory in, the title of 
Agnostic. 

To Agnosticism, in its various forms, 
Huxley may be said to have consecrated 
his life. In one of his latest pieces of 
writing, — in the preface to the " Collected 
Essays," in nine volumes, which happily 
he lived long enough to see through the 
press, — he has put on record the main 
objects of his active career. They were, 
in brief, veracity of thought and action, 
the resolute facing of the world as it 
is, the unlocking of nature's secrets by 
means of science, and the application of 
scientific methods of investigation to all 
the problems of life. If he showed un- 
tiring opposition to clericalism, to the 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 65 

spirit of ecclesiasticism, it was because 
everywhere and to whatever denomination 
it may belong, he regarded it as " the 
deadly enemy of science." 

Few men, I imagine, have ever attained 
more fully the objects of their ambition. 
Huxley was the great enemy of cant, lying, 
and pretending to believe that for which 
there is no evidence. For this all honest 
men owe him a debt of gratitude. He 
earned the praise of every investigator, 
scholar, and thinker by his splendid vindi- 
cation of intellectual liberty. And even 
theologians (of the future, if not of the 
present) may bless him for exposing the 
absurdities of many dogmas which were 
yesterday a part of orthodox Christianity, 
which to-day- — thanks in some measure 
to Huxley — have lost their baneful en- 
ergy, and which, dissolved in the light of 
criticism, will to-morrow flit to that limbo 
of superstitions, errors, and illusions which 
fill so many volumes in the history of our 
groping race. 

All honor and glory to this brilliant 
champion of light, and liberty, and truth ! 
He saw clearly, studied thoroughly, and 
spoke boldly. 



66 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

Yet Huxley had his limitations. His 
horizon was restricted to his field of labor: 
he saw the natural world, but not the su- 
pranatural which envelops it. His hand 
was subdued to what it worked in : he 
grasped the judgments of the intellect, 
but missed the intimations of the spirit 
in man. He lived in the laboratorj^ and 
lecture room : no man knew more of the 
tests and standards of physical science, 
few men knew less of the postulates and 
principles of human conduct and life. 
Huxley's defects are his excellences in 
excess. He sees nature so thoroughly, 
uses his intellect so logically, and rates 
science so highly, that he falls a victim to 
the vices of Naturalism, Intellectualism, 
and what (for want of a better word) I 
will venture to call Scientificism. 

I have already shown that evolutionary 
science furnishes no warrant for that natu- 
ralistic view of the universe which domi- 
nates all Huxley's speculations. Nay, one 
may be an Agnostic, as well as an Evolu- 
tionist, and yet recognize the divine and 
suprasensible Presence in and above the 
physical universe. I will explain what I 
mean by a comparison. Martineau would 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 67 

agree with Huxley in demanding evidence, 
instead of authority, for religious belief ; 
and, as Huxley uses the term, Martineau 
would therefore be an Agnostic. Never- 
theless I venture to assert that no man 
now living has done so much to strengthen 
faith in a free moral intelligence immanent 
in, yet transcending, the natural world and 
holding communion with the finite but 
kindred spirits who inhabit it. As bib- 
lical critics, Huxley and Martineau occupy 
pretty much the same position; as spirit- 
ual influences, revealing the divine essence 
of things, the one radiates light and warmth 
for the English-speaking world, the other 
stands opaque and cold beside the extin- 
guished fires of an altar to the unknown 
God. 

But if Huxley's contentment with the 
mere physical interpretations of science 
was fatal to a theistic conception of the 
world, if his Naturalism left no place for 
the supersensuous and divine, his devo- 
tion to the ascertainment of truth by 
means of logical processes incapacitated 
him for taking a just view of the human 
spirit and foredoomed him to a narrow 
and one-sided Intellectualism. Knowl- 



68 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

edge is only one of the functions of mind. 
Mere intellectual assent or denial marks 
but a small part of the essential life of 
consciousness. If any of you have read 
Disraeli's " Coningsby " you will recall the 
striking passage in which Sidonia shows 
how little reason has contributed to the 
great events of human history. It was 
not reason, he says, that besieged Troy ; 
it was not reason that sent forth the Sara- 
cen from the desert to conquer the world ; 
it was not reason that inspired the Cru- 
sader or instituted the monastic orders ; 
it was not reason that created the French 
Revolution. The true greatness of man 
is to be found in his capacity for forming 
and cherishing ideals. In this age of 
brilliant scientific achievements issuing in 
manifold conveniences and luxuries, I fear 
we have all been seduced into worship- 
ping the golden calf of Intellectualism. 
It would ill become me, in this place and 
before this audience, to disparage the 
value of scientific investigation or to dis- 
courage whole-hearted devotion to the 
ascertainment of truth. But I cannot 
forbear to observe that the spirit which 
each of us is consists not of intellect or 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 69 

reason alone. And this discernment of 
the real constitution of human nature is 
not without important consequences. For 
one thing, it follows that the maxims 
which are binding on the scientist in 
the investigation of nature may be irrele- 
vant or even injurious to the rest of man- 
kind who are engaged in other affairs. 
For the scientist, Huxley says, " scepti- 
cism is the highest of duties ; blind faith 
the one unpardonable sin." Now if this 
be the duty of the scientist, it is not 
the duty of the parent or child, of the 
statesman or teacher, of the merchant or 
manufacturer, of the clerk or financier. 
Nay, has not every true man faith — 
" blind faith" — in his mother and in his 
friends, in his country, and in the rule 
of Eternal Providence ? It is, unhappily, 
true that the scientist's devotion to " scep- 
ticism " may unfit him for living that 
larger life which breathes the atmosphere 
of faith. Darwin observed in his own 
case an atrophy of the poetic and aesthetic 
sensibilities; and readers of his life will 
feel that his religious faith suffered decay 
from the same cause. Cramping and 
warping is the penalty of specialization 



70 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

along whatever line it follow. But the 
fact remains that for living our human 
lives faith is as essential as scepticism, 
nay, far more essential. It was his fail- 
ure to comprehend the depths and riches 
of the human spirit, whose logical opera- 
tions alone concerned him as a scientist, 
that led Huxley to the shrine of Intellect- 
ualism, whose creed, however fruitful for 
science, becomes, if applied beyond the 
domain of science, a desecration and blight 
to the whole spiritual and active life of 
humanity. 

A few words on what I have called 
Huxley's Scientificism, and I will bid you 
good night. By this term I mean to 
designate the astonishing prejudice that 
the scientific investigator, the man who 
has great knowledge of the natural world, 
is, as such, an authority on the things of 
the spirit. This is a prejudice which 
indicates no self-conceit in Huxley; for 
he shared it with the generations that 
have grown up in the atmosphere of 
modern science. We all want to know 
what Darwin or Helmholtz or any other 
oracle of the natural world thought of the 
moral and spiritual problems which weigh 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 71 

upon us. We find, however, through 
mournful disappointments, that they have 
little or nothing to tell us. They have 
had no special experience that way, if in- 
deed their minds have not been closed to 
this order of reality. In consulting them 
our age has made the mistake of confer- 
ring with perhaps the worst-qualified ex- 
ponents of the spiritual world to whom it 
was possible to address such inquiries. 
Mr. Gladstone has recently recorded it, as 
a generalization of his long experience 
with Englishmen of every class and type, 
that the description of persons who are 
engaged in political employment or who 
are in any way habitually conversant with 
human nature, conduct, and concerns are 
very much less borne down by scepticism 
than specialists of various kinds and those 
whose pursuits have associated them with 
the study, history, and framework of in- 
animate nature. How can this latter class 
be expected to tell us anything about that 
of which they have had no experience ? 
The oracle to consult in matters of religion 
is the man of faith and action, not the man 
of scepticism and science. His reports of 
the spiritual world, as verified in his own 



72 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

life, are entitled to the same weight as the 
observations, verified by artificial experi- 
ment, which the scientist reports of the 
natural world. If the one is our authority 
for scientific belief, the other is entitled 
to be our authority for religious faith. I 
will not here name our highest authority 
for belief and trust in God. It is enough 
that you address your inquiries to any 
man of action who allied himself with 
moral causes and worked for spiritual 
ends. I take at random a product of our 
own native soil. 

Huxley says that Darwin was " the in- 
corporated ideal of a man of science." I 
should say that Lincoln was the incorpo- 
rated ideal of a man of action. Charles 
Darwin and Abraham Lincoln! These 
are the two greatest names of the century. 
The one wrought a revolution in natural 
science, the other in the affairs and insti- 
tutions of his own country. There are 
strange coincidences in the lives of these 
two men. Both were born on the 12th 
day of February, 1809. The Englishman 
had the advantage of a refined home, a 
school and college education, travel and 
study abroad, and the leisure of a lifetime 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 73 

to meditate and write. Lincoln was born 
in a log-cabin in Kentucky, went to school 
for less than a year, worked as a common 
farm laborer till he became of age, and 
served afterwards as a boatman, a clerk, a 
storekeeper, a soldier, a postmaster, and a 
surveyor, until finally he became a lawyer 
and in 1834 was elected to the legislature 
of Illinois. For the next two decades 
Lincoln lived a comparatively uneventful 
life, not distinguishing himself above his 
contemporaries, and had he died before 
1857 the world would never have heard 
his name. Throughout this same period 
Darwin, in studious retirement, unknown 
to the public, was chewing the cud of 
natural selection. At the same time 
both men were suddenly pushed into 
prominence and publicity, and had fame 
thrust upon them, by the action of illus- 
trious rivals who threatened to pluck 
their foreordained honors. The inciting 
genius of the one was Wallace ; of the 
other, Douglas. Alike moved to action in 
1858, Darwin published the first outline 
of a new theory of the origin of species, 
which was destined to put him at the 
head of modern science ; and Lincoln de- 



74 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

livered his " divided house " speech, which 
made him two years later President of the 
United States. 

Never before in the history of the world 
did a ruler come to so dubious and diffi- 
cult an estate. The Republic was already 
in the throes of dismemberment. Lincoln 
himself, who had been elected by a popu- 
lar vote a million smaller than that re- 
ceived by the three defeated candidates, 
was an object of distrust and prejudice to 
a majority of the people and of ridicule 
and contempt to a not inconsiderable mi- 
nority. His party was made up of dis- 
cordant elements ; and the opposite party 
was suspicious and hostile. There were 
no leaders who commanded the confidence 
of the public, either in statesmanship or 
in war. The army, small as it was, was 
scattered, and many of its officers had 
deserted. There was no money in the 
treasury, and the national credit was 
sinking. The seceding states, which had 
long been preparing for the contest, im- 
mediately organized under a strong cen- 
tral government ; and their organization, 
their unity of purpose and community of 
interest, their previous habits and experi- 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 75 

ence, their matchless generals, and their 
immediately available military resources 
gave them at the outset an enormous 
advantage. The great powers of West- 
ern Europe manifested a cold neutrality, 
and cherished a secret hostility, towards 
the national government; and their sym- 
pathy and moral support were given to 
the confederates. Yet from all these dire 
circumstances the inexperienced man of 
the prairies wrested immortal victory. 
He united his own party, enlisted the 
support of the opposition, and won the 
confidence of the people. At his call 
soldiers poured into the army and money 
into the treasury. Terrible disasters were 
followed by brilliant victories, by Vicks- 
burg, by Gettysburg, and by the march 
from Atlanta to the Sea. Almost by accla- 
mation the great leader was re-elected to 
the Presidency. And before sealing the 
immortal work with his martyr's blood, 
he saw the confederacy overthrown, the 
union re-established, and the slave set 
free. His memory is the most precious 
heritage of the American people ; they 
recognize in their great war President — 
"kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man" 



76 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

— a fellow-worker with Divine Provi- 
dence. 

This is the man of action, engaged in 
noble struggles, whose testimony I would 
seek in regard to religious faith. If 
Darwin's spiritual powers were atrophied 
by his absorbing preoccupation with the 
phenomena of the natural world; if, like 
the domestic duck whose wings, he tells 
us, have become shrunken and useless 
from disuse, the pinions of his own soul, 
disabled for want of exercise, refused to 
soar above the solid ground of nature's 
familiar scenes and occurences ; and if 
the glances he sometimes cast into the 
depths of the distant heavens only brought 
him a deeper sense of " the heavy and the 
weary weight of all this unintelligible 
world," which he nevertheless conjectured 
must hav$ a Divine Artificer ; — if, I say, 
the most scientific of theoretic inquirers 
has no experience that brings authentic 
tidings of a reality beyond the veil of 
sense, let us turn to the doer of deeds of 
justice and righteousness and see whether 
the orbit of his best endeavor has ever 
seen the light of Infinite Goodness or felt 
the touch and thrill of Will Omnipotent. 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 77 

Now, it is a happy circumstance that 
our "first American," as Lowell calls him, 
leaves us in no doubt either as to the 
fact of his faith in God or as to the 
power which that faith gave him in doing 
what history, I think, will pronounce the 
supreme work of the nineteenth century. 
Indeed, Lincoln talked with such serene 
confidence, such perfect assurance of pious 
faith, that some persons believed him to be 
superstitious. Certainly the veil between 
the natural and the supranatural was for 
him neither thick nor opaque. God ruled 
the world in righteousness, and men were 
the servants and instruments of His rule : 
such was the faith that thrilled in every 
drop of Lincoln's blood. " I know," he 
said to his friend Bateman not long before 
the war, " I know that there is a God, and 
He hates injustice and slavery." And again : 
" Douglas don't care whether slavery is 
voted up or down, but God cares, and 
humanity cares, and I care; and with 
God's help I shall not fail." A greater 
than Lincoln has said : " If any man will 
do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
trine, whether it be of God." Moral 
action is the road to spiritual intuition. 



78 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

This great truth, which the world is 
always ignoring, was splendidly verified 
in and by Lincoln. He took his stand 
on principle ; he did what was right ; and 
the right approved itself in his conscious- 
ness the law and will of a righteous God, 
with infinite power at its disposal. Thus 
right makes might. Thus Lincoln saved 
the Republic. And I wish to say deliber- 
ately, after reading many lives of Lincoln 
and trying to understand the history of 
the Civil War, that in my opinion the 
Union could not have been restored with- 
out the unseen, but none the less real, 
power which came to the nation through 
Lincoln's belief in God and confidence in 
His moral government of the world. 

Nor was Lincoln's faith a matter of tra- 
dition. It rested on no external authority 
whatever, not even the Bible, - — a book 
which, with Shakespeare, always lay on 
his table and which he read every day. 
"No," he said in answer to Chittenden's 
question whether it must not all depend 
on our faith in the Bible, "no, there is the 
element of personal experience." And, let 
me add, that this basis of religion is pre- 
cisely the same as that which science 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 79 

enjoys ; for the principle of the uniform- 
ity of nature, on which all science rests, 
is simply a postulate or axiom which 
experience confirms but cannot demon- 
strate. Faith in God we cannot prove 
though it approves itself to us. 

It is true that Lincoln never joined any 
of the churches. He had mental reser- 
vations about their long and complicated 
statements of Christian doctrine. But he 
said to Congressman Deming that, when 
any church would inscribe over its altar, 
as the sole qualification for membership, 
" the Saviour's condensed statement " of 
the substance of both law and gospel : 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy strength, and with all thy 
mind ; and thy neighbor as thyself," that 
church would he join with all his heart 
and soul. 

But this confession of faith brings me 
back to Huxley, whom I have too long 
kept in the background. Once and, so far 
as I know, once only, Huxley gives us his 
own positive conception of religion. It 
is in the essay on " Genesis versus Nature." 
He first quotes the verse from Micah : 



80 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 

"And what doth the Lord require of 
thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with thy God" ; and 
then he adds this statement : "If any so- 
called religion takes away from this great 
saying of Micah, I think it wantonly muti- 
lates, while, if it adds thereto, I think it 
obscures the perfect ideal of religion." 

If this was Huxley's own religion, — 
and that I take to be the meaning of the 
passage, — then, in spite of all his pro- 
fessional and controversial Agnosticism, 
Huxley's personal faith would seem to 
have been not so different from Lincoln's, 
although it was probably neither so sure 
nor so fervent. • This blending of conser- 
vatism in essential faith, quietly and per- 
sonally held, with radicalism provoked by 
disputation over unessential dogmas, is 
no unique phenomenon in human nature. 
Even Hume, when he was told that he 
had subverted the principles of religion, 
replied that he threw out his speculations 
to entertain the learned and metaphysical 
world, yet he did "not think so differently 
from the rest of the world " as people im- 
agined. It may well be, therefore, that 
if we go deep enough we shall find that 



SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 81 

the difference in faith between Huxley, 
the Agnostic scientist, and Lincoln, the 
Christian statesman, is not a funda- 
mental one. The one has voiced his 
creed in the golden text of the Old 
Testament, the other in the golden text 
of the New ; but the substance of the 
confession is the same in both. If this 
faith be not the Christian religion, it 
was certainly the religion of Christ. Yet 
Huxley, living, was the last man in the 
world to force himself into an unwilling 
communion. And, now that he is gone, 
piety forbids us to rank him with those 
who might disown him. Let us leave him, 
therefore, in the pomerium of Agnosticism. 
But if any wise ruler in Israel, if any 
intelligent citizen of the Civitas Dei, will 
hold converse with him there and learn 
something of his heart and life as well as 
of his intellect, he will, I think, return to 
us and report in the spirit of that pro- 
found epigram in which Carlyle recorded 
his first meeting with John Sterling, that 
they did " very well " together, " arguing 
copiously, but except in opinion not disa- 
greeing." 



PART II 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 



" For now we see through a glass, darkly ; 
♦ . . now I know in part." 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

The Agnostic is one who holds that he 
has no knowledge of God, or, indeed, that 
the human mind is incapable of reaching 
a knowledge of God. Though this creed 
is not new, it has reached its highest 
potency of expression in modern times, 
and the name by which it is designated is 
of very recent origin. The linguistic mint- 
age we owe to Professor Huxley. Bor- 
rowing the word " Agnostic " from the 
Greek designation of that " unknown " God 
whose altar Paul saw at Athens, he in- 
vested the imported term with a metaphys- 
ical meaning to which the original was 
neutral and indifferent, and sent it forth 
to proclaim to the modern world a mental 
incompetency in regard to the knowing 
of God, which up to this time had been 
merely implied by the more general term 
of scepticism. The new name was coined 
in 1869. That an appellation was needed 
85 



86 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

proves that the Agnostic sect was coming 
into prominence. The church it would 
supersede was an accomplished fact when 
at Antioch the disciples were first called 
Christians. 

The canonical writings of the Agnostic 
sect all antedate the year of its christen- 
ing. We have not space here to examine 
them or even to enumerate their titles. 
But whether the authors be rationalistic 
or empirical philosophers, Christian di- 
vines or positivist scientists, the burden 
of their message is always the incapacity 
of the human mind to know anything but 
the phenomena of the sensible world, or 
the contradictions in which it is involved 
when it essays to reach Infinite and Abso- 
lute Reality. This is the refrain, some- 
what monotonous it must be admitted, of 
Mr. Herbert Spencer's metaphysics, varied 
only by denunciation of those whose relig- 
ion consists in humble faith in God, not 
in confident assurance of His incogniza- 
bleness. This is the universal incanta- 
tion by which Dean Mansel would exorcise 
doubt of revealed religion, as though by 
poisoning the chalice of natural knowledge 
he could commend to our lips the divine 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 87 

wine of revelation ! Both Mansel and Mr. 
Spencer borrow the doctrine of nescience 
from Hamilton, in whose system it appears 
as the result of an inauspicious attempt to 
combine the speculations of Kant with 
the sober, home-staying philosophy of the 
Scottish school. With Kant and Hume 
(who provoked Kant into becoming a 
critical philosopher) we reach the foun- 
tain-heads of modern Agnosticism. Now 
Kant and Hume also mark an epoch in 
the history of philosophy, — for the rea- 
son, as generally stated, that they were 
the first to make knowledge itself their 
problem, instead of the objects of knowl- 
edge with which their predecessors had 
been exclusively engaged. But this is 
not a complete explanation of the special 
significance of Kant and Hume. Not 
only was knowledge itself their theme, 
not only did they propose to discover by 
analysis its nature, elements, and sources, 
but their primary interest lay in determin- 
ing its limits, — in settling for all time 
what could be known and marking off 
from it what must forever remain unknow- 
able. And each working in his own way, 
— Kant with the pretentious apparatus of 



88 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

rationalism, Hume with the simple instru- 
ments of empiricism, — reached the same 
solution of the problem : to wit, the know- 
ableness of whatever we apprehend by 
means of our senses, the unknowableness 
of any other reality. Both agree that the 
human mind is incapacitated by its very 
constitution for the apprehension of God. 
Thus it was not merely by recalling specu- 
lation from the objects of knowledge to 
the knowing process itself, but by concen- 
trating attention upon the limits of knowl- 
edge, that Hume and Kant gave a new 
shape to philosophy and laid at the same 
time the foundations of modern Agnosti- 
cism. Hume's position, however, has so 
much resemblance to the scepticism that 
constantly attended, and ultimately super- 
vened upon, the constructive systems of 
ancient philosophy that one might, with- 
out straining the comparison, fairly recog- 
nize his earliest forerunners in Protagoras 
and Pyrrho and JEnesidemus. These are 
the prophets of the old dispensation of 
Agnosticism, as Hume and Kant are the 
evangelists of the new, or Mr. Spencer its 
great apostle to the Gentiles. 

This juxtaposition of names will serve 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 89 

to bring out a truth which seems to be 
little understood, but which is of the ut- 
most significance, if we are to see Agnos- 
ticism in its true perspective. It shows 
that belief in the incognizableness of God 
is no accidental or belated phase of human 
thought. Whether Agnosticism be an 
illusion or an insight of reason, it is not 
merely a casual or modern eclipse of faith. 
However named, it has from the very dawn 
of reflection haunted with its shadow the 
struggling light of " divine philosophy." 

Now a factor so permanent must spring 
from constant conditions. If the doctrine 
of the unknowableness of God appears and 
reappears at every critical epoch in the 
evolution of philosophy, as it certainly 
does, it would seem to have some nec- 
essary connection with the progress of 
constructive thought itself. A careful 
scrutiny will show that Agnosticism is the 
logical consequence of certain habits of 
thought, of which the human mind can 
with difficulty divest itself. Like every 
creation of man, philosophy is character- 
ized by imperfection. The themes of phil- 
osophy are Reality and Knowledge. But 
even the best system has fallen short of a 



90 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

perfect conception of the Supreme Being 
and an infallible theory of the origin and 
nature of Knowledge. Nor is this surpris- 
ing, for philosophers are but men, and they 
bring to their speculative work the views 
and prejudices of the human race. Now, 
partly in consequence of his animal his- 
tory, partly as a result of his nature, and 
partly by the necessities of existence, man, 
tested by ideal standards, is prone to lay 
undue stress upon the things of sense, so 
that he is ready to treat perceptions alone 
as truth and material objects as the sole 
reality. From this immersion in sense 
and matter, it has been the divine mission 
of philosophy to redeem us. But here, 
as elsewhere, the real proves refractory to 
the ideal ; and philosophy has not infre- 
quently succumbed to the error she was 
sent to overcome. She has too often re- 
duced Knowledge to sensation, and pict- 
ured God after the analogy of material 
things or mechanical processes. Such a 
knowledge cannot reveal God, for neither 
eye nor ear nor any other sense can per- 
ceive Him ; and such a representation of 
God as an object among other objects easily 
discloses absurdities and contradictions. 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 91 

Agnosticism, therefore, is the corollary of 
every sensational theory of Knowledge 
and every mechanical conception of God. 

But Agnosticism is also the refutation 
of the sensational and mechanical philoso- 
phy, or at any rate its reductio ad absurdurn. 
The human spirit cannot on reflection be- 
lieve either that there is no Divine Spirit 
or that the Divine Spirit does not reveal 
Himself in the consciousness of man. 
Agnosticism, therefore, is a challenge to 
philosophy to frame a rational theory of 
Knowledge and a spiritual notion of God. 
And as nothing interests man so deeply 
as the knowledge of God, we may claim 
that Agnosticism has been the most potent 
factor in the movement of the human 
spirit towards the true apprehension of its 
Divine original. The Agnostic himself 
may not always be conscious of the func- 
tion which he discharges in the economy 
of thought, and he may even take mali- 
cious pleasure in the reflection that he is a 
stumbling-block and a stone of offence to 
the theologians. But nothing is more 
certain than that the Agnostic's demon- 
strations of nescience fail to produce 
conviction, and their most general and 



92 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

permanent effect is to prompt thought 
to a consideration, criticism, and correc- 
tion of the premises from which such a 
paradoxical conclusion has been inferred. 
The effort to paralyze reason only provokes 
reason to brace herself for another flight. 
The theory of nescience is but the obverse 
of the fact of science. The Agnostic, 
in laying down the limits of Knowledge, is 
a champion of the might of mind. That 
he can make such a demonstration is the 
refutation of what he demonstrates. A 
false prophet testifying to the truth, he 
reminds one of the description which 
Mephistopheles gives of himself : 

" Ein Theil von jener Kraft, 
Die stats das Bose will, und stats das Gute schafft." 

Let us look at the matter a little more 
closely. Agnosticism affirms that we can- 
not know God. Its thesis is bound up in 
the two notions, God and Knowledge. 
The contention is that these terms can- 
not be brought together. Now, if this 
dogma be tenable, the reason must be 
either in the nature of Knowledge, as 
somehow inadequate to the apprehension 
of God, or in the nature of God, as some- 



' PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 93 

how transcending the reach of Knowl- 
edge. Both forms of proof have been 
used by the Agnostic. The argument, 
however, in either form is far from con- 
clusive. Let us examine each in turn, 
beginning with the supposed inability of 
Knowledge to reach to God. 

I. Why should Knowledge be disquali- 
fied from reporting the Supreme Reality? 
In the long history of scepticism, one, and 
but one, plausible answer has been given 
to this question. It has been claimed 
that Knowledge consists of sensations, 
and that, as God cannot be felt or seen 
or heard or apprehended by any other 
sense, the human consciousness is inac- 
cessible to intimations, not merely of His 
nature, but even of His existence. The 
argument may be stated in different ways 
by sceptics of the ancient and of the 
modern schools, but in substance it has 
changed little since it was first put for- 
ward by the Greek Sophists, who derived 
it from the metaphysics of Heracleitus. 
Of course God, as a suprasensible being, 
must be declared unknowable, if you set 
out with defining knowledge as a con- 
geries of sensations imprinted upon the 



94 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

mind by the objects of the sensible world. 
But, as Plato already demonstrated, this 
conception of Knowledge is palpably false. 
It labors under three radical defects, 
which, although inseparably connected 
with one another, it will be well for us 
to contemplate severally. 

In the first place, this theory treats 
knowing as a kind of mechanical process. 
It places the material world on one side 
and mind as an " empty chamber " on the 
other ; and it pictures knowing as the 
filling of the chamber, through the con- 
duits of sense, with outpourings from the 
external reservoir of being. Or, to use 
another favorite metaphor, mind, accord- 
ing to this mechanical philosophy, is a 
waxen tablet, and Knowledge consists of 
the impressions made upon it by the things 
of sense. The bald statement of this the- 
ory is perhaps its best refutation. Yet, 
as it is rooted in that materialism which 
is implicit in the constitution of language 
itself, we need not wonder that popular 
thought has always been in bondage to 
it. So long as we must use in describing 
mental processes terms which were origi- 
nally framed to signify physical processes, 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 95 

so long shall we be exposed to the danger 
of conceiving mind after the analogy of 
matter. With all his sense, circumspec- 
tion, and insight, the father of English 
philosophy did not avoid this error, though 
the third book of the " Essay of Human 
Understanding " is an impressive warning 
against it. And what in Locke was occa- 
sional, and to a certain extent overbal- 
anced by a contrary view, appears in the 
latest scion of the English school as an 
habitual and radical illusion ; for though 
we may accept Mr. Spencer's personal dis- 
avowal of materialism, no reader can have 
failed to observe that his philosophy of 
mind is dominated by the theory of the 
"waxen tablet" and the "empty cham- 
ber." To all such mechanical hypotheses 
there is one effective answer. The simple 
fact is that mind is not material or like 
anything material. It is a spiritual ac- 
tivity, sui generis, of which we are imme- 
diately conscious in all its movements, but 
which w^e can liken to nothing else what- 
ever, for to it, as subject, the world and 
all that therein is stand opposed as object. 
And it is an equally certain fact that the 
act of knowing, whatever else it may be, 



96 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

is no migration of things into conscious- 
ness through the avenues of sensation. 
When we see or hear objects, the retina 
or the tympanum is, indeed, affected with 
vibrations of ether or of air ; and these 
disturbances are transmitted by appropri- 
ate nerves to the cerebral tracts which 
modern physiology has learned to locate : 
but they do not drop over this utmost 
verge of the physical into the mental 
world, to which, indeed, they are not one 
whit nearer at the centre than they were 
at the periphery of the nervous organism ; 
and as for a metamorphosis of them into 
conscious ideas, this is a miracle in com- 
parison with which the floating of iron or 
the turning of water into wine is easily 
credible, — a miracle, too, for which there 
is no justification, as the consciousness 
which it is thus intended to produce is 
given to us as a primal and ultimate fact, 
being that which is nearest to us, that of 
which we are most assured, and that by 
means of which we know everything else, 
including the cerebral tremors from which 
it is sought to educe it. " The mind is 
its own place." In knowing it is not pos- 
sessed by, but itself possesses, the objects 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 97 

it apprehends. Knowledge is not the 
product of things ; it is the creation of 
the mind. Juster far than the " waxen 
tablet " account of Knowledge is Brown- 
ing's description — that passage of " Para- 
celsus " in which poetry and philosophy 
coalesce in a climax of beauty and sug- 
gestiveness : 

" Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fulness ; and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception — which is truth. 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it, and makes all error : and to KNOW 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 

In the second place, the theory of Knowl- 
edge on which Agnosticism is based, misses 
in its analysis of the elements of cognition 
the most important constituent. It sees 
in Knowledge nothing but sensations. Of 
course this doctrine is of a piece with the 
mechanical conception of mind. If the 
understanding be an " empty chamber," if 
the cognition of things be the filling of 



98 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

it with impressions from without, this 
inflowing material of sensation must 
make up the entire content of Knowl- 
edge. But we have already rejected as 
false the mechanical account of mind. 
And this sensational theory of Knowl- 
edge is obnoxious to equally cogent ob- 
jections. For when we look closely at 
the facts, we find that, even if the sen- 
sationalist's contention be admitted, only 
the smallest part of our Knowledge would 
be accounted for. It might perhaps ex- 
plain the qualities we attribute to sub- 
stances, — red, sweet, heavy, etc., — but 
what could it mean by substances, or by 
the relations between them which con- 
stitute the most important part, not only 
of ordinary experience, but also of sci- 
ence ? These constituents of conscious- 
ness are a standing rebuke to the 
sensationalist. There are others of the 
same kind, among which the moral in- 
tuitions deserve a prominent place. 
Taken together, they prove that mind 
is rational as well as sentient. Nay, 
more, the sense-element of Knowledge 
is of less consequence than the thought- 
element. Sensations alone convey no 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 99 

information to us ; they are dumb and 
blank. It is reason which., present at 
every point with sense, reads into the 
impressions of eye and ear and touch 
notions that give them meaning and 
make them significant reports of an ob- 
jective world. A purely sensitive con- 
sciousness could know nothing ; it could 
not even apprehend its sensations ; for 
apprehension is impossible without cate- 
gories of thought to discriminate and 
classify. If Knowledge were made up 
of sensations merely, it would cease to 
be Knowledge. Thus sensationalism, if 
logically carried out, not only leads to 
religious scepticism but to universal nes- 
cience. It is the lion's cave, from which 
there are no tracks outwards. It may 
seem strange that the Agnostic scientist 
should rest in a theory which is not 
more fatal to theology than to science ; 
but this only shows in what a lack of 
rigorous thinking his religious creed was 
engendered and what immunity from 
criticism any fashionable cult enjoys. 
Be that as it may, an exhaustive analy- 
sis of cognition will disclose reason as 
its vital principle. And to a rational 



100 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

intelligence the existence of, God is 
neither less nor more knowable than the 
existence of the Self or of the World. 
The truth that mind is rational as well 
as sentient, is fatal to the main sup- 
port of Agnosticism, — the easy argument 
drawn from the dogma that Knowledge 
is of sensations only. And with the dis- 
appearance of sensationalism, which is 
fast yielding to a juster conception of 
what Knowledge really is, the Agnostic 
wiseacres who have terrified the faint- 
hearted amongst us by pretentiously 
delimiting and circumscribing human 
knowledge, will find themselves without 
a vocation. No other generation, it is 
safe to predict, will see the farce of nes- 
cie?ice playing at omniscience in setting 
the bounds of science. Scepticism may, 
indeed, survive and manifest itself at 
every forward step in the intellectual 
development of individuals and com- 
munities ; for deeper doubt is the first 
effect of larger knowledge ; but with 
the demise of sensationalism, this psycho- 
logical shadow, though it continue to be 
called Agnosticism, will never again take 
itself for the light of ultimate truth or 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 101 

pretend that it can pierce even to the 
dividing of the knowable from the un- 
knowable universe. 

It has now been shown, first, that the 
Agnostic misrepresents the subject of 
Knowledge, and, secondly, that he mis- 
reports the elements of Knowledge. The 
third criticism to be made upon him is 
that he misunderstands the meaning of 
Knowledge. Even if the mind were an 
empty chamber, and in knowing it were 
filled with sensational material, the im- 
port of Knowledge — that which it sig- 
nifies — would be something other than 
this process of furnishing. Now the Ag- 
nostic fails to discern what it is whereof 
consciousness gives us information. He 
blunders in reading the communication, 
and he confounds the parties whom it 
concerns. Sensationalism has so per- 
verted his vision that he no longer sees 
realities, but images or even after-images. 
He will have it that in knowing we are 
cognizant merely of mental states, whereas 
what we know is always some Reality, and 
it is only by subsequent reflection and 
analysis we discover that sensational or 
ideational states were in any way in- 



102 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

volved in the cognition of that reality. 
The Agnostic tells us we cannot know 
God because states of consciousness testify- 
to nothing beyond themselves. But the 
fact is that Knowledge is a report of 
Reality ; and if this fact be incompatible 
with the supposition of states of conscious- 
ness as constitutive of Knowledge, that 
supposition had better be dismissed to 
the arsenal of physical imagery from 
which it has been derived. That intelli- 
gence should make us aware of existence, 
and not merely of its own states, is no 
more surprising than that anything should 
be what it actually is. How it comes that 
we are cognizant of Reality, is a question 
neither more nor less difficult than this 
other, which is really its equivalent, 
namely, How comes it that we are in- 
telligent beings ? That we are intelli- 
gent beings, is at any rate a fact ; and it 
is just the nature of intelligence to have 
converse with existence. This is no the- 
ory about Knowledge, but simply a state- 
ment of what it is. And the statement 
is so self-evident that it would never have 
been questioned — indeed, it would not 
have been necessary explicitly to make it 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 103 

— but for mechanical theories alike of the 
knower, of knowing, and of Knowledge, 
Now just as the knower is not a waxen 
tablet, but a self-conscious spirit ; and as 
knowing is not the receiving of impres- 
sions from without, but creative activity 
at home ; so Knowledge is not an aggre- 
gate of miscellaneous materials in a store- 
house called mind, but it is the unfolding 
of a living intelligence which, while open 
to all the influences of earth and sky, re- 
mains identical with itself, and so trans- 
forms or transubstantiates what it takes 
up from the environment as to make each 
addition the expression of its own life, — 
a life which at every stage of this process 
of differentiation and integration attains 
not only to a fuller revelation but to a 
more perfect realization of its own in- 
most being. 

In the long course of this development, 
the essential principles of intelligence — the 
vital stuff of which Knowledge is compact 

— have clearly delineated themselves, al- 
though they are not obscure even in the 
crude thought of primitive mankind. At 
first, however, they are rather presupposed 
than explicitly conceived or expressly de- 



104 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

scribed. But in the dawning, as in the 
full-orbed, intelligence there are present 
three ideas, which not only fix its circuit 
but constitute also its real essence. They 
are the consciousness of the world, the con- 
sciousness of self, and the consciousness 
of God. These three realities are the soul 
of Knowledge, at once its essential sub- 
stance and its ultimate goal. Its sub- 
stance, for Knowledge at every stage, 
from that of the savage to that of the 
scientist, is an effort to realize more 
clearly what we mean by nature, by man, 
and by God ; and its goal, for the pro- 
gressive movement of Knowledge always 
returns upon its starting-points, only with 
a more exhaustive consciousness of the 
subject and the object, and of God as the 
focal source of their opposition and their 
union. Of course it is not meant that 
these three elements of intelligence are 
all equally conspicuous at every stage of 
its evolution, whether in individuals or 
in communities. On the contrary, there 
is first that which is natural and after- 
wards that which is spiritual ; first the 
consciousness of objects, and afterwards 
self-consciousness and the consciousness 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 105 

of God. Not, however, that any intelli- 
gence is merely percipient of the external 
world; the meaning is simply that at first 
the objective consciousness predominates 
over the other forms of consciousness 
which, nevertheless, are vaguely present 
even from the beginning. The mental 
eye looks outward upon nature before 
it looks inward upon itself or upward to 
the common source both of vision and the 
visible — of intelligence and the intel- 
ligible world. But though the idea of 
God is that element of intelligence which 
is latest to develop into clear conscious- 
ness, — and which must be latest, for it is 
the unity of the difference of the self and 
the not-self, which are, therefore, presup- 
posed, — it has not less validity in itself, 
it gives no less trustworthy assurance of 
actuality, than the consciousness of the 
self or the consciousness of the not-self. 
This is a point which philosophy has per- 
haps not sufficiently emphasized. At any 
rate, it is a point which the Agnostic fails 
to appreciate. For if it is conceded that 
there is an objective world of which 
something is known, and a subjective 
spirit of whom something is known, it 



106 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

cannot be that we are ignorant of God 
or in doubt of His existence. Like the 
self and the world, God is given to us as 
the presupposition of intelligence ; and 
so long as this evidence accredits them it 
cannot discredit Him. It might of course 
be said that we know no realities at all — 
neither finite nor infinite ; but this view 
is repugnant to common sense, it rests on 
a false ideal of Knowledge, and in prac- 
tice it is impossible to carry out. Knowl- 
edge cannot relax its hold on Reality, for 
Reality is the substance of its story. And 
the point here emphasized is that our 
knowledge of God is the same in kind 
as our knowledge of the external world 
or of ourselves. 

If it should be urged that, in the history 
of scepticism, the divine existence has often 
been put in doubt, one might retort that 
the self and the world have fared no bet- 
ter at the hands of materialists and subjec- 
tive idealists. These historical instances 
remind us of the danger of operating with 
one-sided abstractions and turning them 
against each other. In the face of such 
arbitrary partisanship for either the sub- 
ject or the object, or for either the finite 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 107 , 

or the infinite, the fact needs to be stated 
that as intelligence is conversant with nat- 
ure, and self, and God, so it knows them, 
not in isolation from one another, but only 
in their mutual relation and implication. 
We are not conscious of ourselves in sep- 
aration from the objective world : on the 
contrary, the latter nourishes our subjec- 
tive life of feeling and of cognition while, 
in volition, we react against it. Neither 
do we know the object divorced from the 
subject : it is we who perceive it ; ours are 
the sensations which give content to the 
perception, ours the thoughts which con- 
strue it into an object possessing definite 
qualities of its own and having definite 
relations to other objects in the expanse 
of an all-embracing space and the se- 
quence of an ever-during time. And as 
subject and object mutually imply each 
other, so, if Knowledge is to be complete, 
they presuppose a principle of unity as 
ground of their connection and reconcilia- 
tion of their opposition. Only on rising 
to this unity, only when we "see all things 
in God," can we see things as they truly 
are. The consciousness of God is the log- 
ical prius of the consciousness of self and 



108 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

of the world. But not, as already ob- 
served, the chronological ; for, according 
to the profound observation of Aristotle, 
what in the nature of things is first, is in 
the order of development last. Just be- 
cause God is the first principle of being 
and knowing, is He the last to be mani- 
fested and known. If this sound para- 
doxical, it may be asked whether all 
experience does not show that what is 
nearest to us is the last thing to be 
known; and whether, therefore, a princi- 
ple which is one with the very existence 
of intelligence should not be the latest to 
come into distinct consciousness and to 
gain verification and demonstration. Yet, 
from the beginning, human thought has 
been haunted by the presence of God. 
And beneath all the crude pictures through 
which the fancy and imagination of all 
peoples have endeavored to represent Him, 
we may discern the never-failing concep- 
tion of God as the ultimate unity, who, in 
some way or other, takes up into Himself 
the differences of the objective and the 
subjective world. But, as the conscious- 
ness of the self and the not-self thus per- 
fects itself in the consciousness of God, 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 109 

so our consciousness of God, which is no 
otiose and transcendent abstraction, real- 
izes itself in all our Knowledge of the 
world and of ourselves. It is not more 
certain that the finite implies the infinite 
than that the infinite moves and has its 
being in the finite. In the strictest sense, 
therefore, nature and man are the revela- 
tion of God. These two volumes may be 
compared with the Old and the New Tes- 
tament. In both cases it is the later rev- 
elation which is the clearer. Man, as the 
highest point to which evolution has at- 
tained, best expresses the meaning and 
drift of the process and most clearly re- 
veals the nature of the spirit which under- 
lies it. Still the God who reveals Himself 
in man, especially in the moral and spirit- 
ual life of man, also reveals Himself in 
nature. All our Knowledge, therefore, 
of the finite is at the same time a knowl- 
edge of the infinite. It would be passing 
strange, if the light wherewith science is 
flooding the world and human life served 
simply to disclose our ignorance of God, 
of whom the world and human life are 
the express revelation. This illumination 
is surely not intended to smite reason to 



110 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

the earth or to light her "the way to 
dusky death." And she will escape from 
the confusion into which Agnosticism 
would bring her by the recognition that 
the spirit that fills "all thinking things, 
all objects of all thought," is known to us 
through our observations of nature and 
the experience of human history, but 
most of all in the stirrings of our own 
spirit, which wise men of old declared to 
be in the image of God. 

From all that has been said, it would 
seem to follow beyond peradventure that 
there is nothing in the nature of Knowl- 
edge to warrant the dogma of religious 
nescience. On the contrary, since Knowl- 
edge is of Reality, and since the Infinite 
Reality is known in the same way and 
with the same evidence of assurance as 
the finite realities of the subjective and 
objective consciousness (which also pre- 
suppose the Infinite Being as the ground 
of their union and. reconciliation), it is 
clear that, unless in a mood of finical but 
absurd scepticism, Ave are prepared to dis- 
charge all knowledge as illusory, we can- 
not impeach our knowledge of God or 
refuse to accept it as trustworthy. Ag- 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 111 

nosticism, so far as it rests on the sup- 
posed limits of our cognitive faculties, is 
in reality an utterly baseless dogma. 

II. But the Agnostic, as was remarked 
at the outset, has another argument. He 
finds in the very nature of God evidence 
of His incognizableness. This argument 
is not so different from the preceding as 
might at first appear. Both presuppose 
an impassable chasm between human in- 
telligence and Divine Reality. But the 
argument which has been already so fully 
traversed, imputes the estoppel of commu- 
nication to a fundamental incapacity of 
the human mind. The argument which 
is now to be considered, explains the 
breach by the essential inhospitableness, 
inaccessibility, or incommunicableness of 
God. The pith of the one argument is 
this, that Knowledge by its very nature 
must fall short of God. The pith of the 
other argument is this, that God by His 
very nature must transcend Knowledge. 
The eternal divorce of the Divine Being 
and human intelligence is the burden of 
both ; only, in one case the ground is dis- 
covered in a Divine excess, and in the 
other in a human defect. But the note- 



112 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

worthy thing is that the incompatibility 
of this pair arises not from a fault in each 
separately or in either alone, but from 
a fault which is due merely to their con- 
junction ; for that excess of being would 
not be an excess but for this defect of 
knowing, and this defect of knowing 
would not be a defect but for that excess 
of being. Consequently, in reasoning 
from the transcendency of God, the Ag- 
nostic is using the same argument as 
when he reasoned from the limitation of 
Knowledge, only he is looking at the mat- 
ter from a different point of view — from 
the point of view of that which is known 
(or rather not known) instead of that 
which knows. This being so, it will be 
possible to dispose of the second defence 
of Agnosticism in much less space than it 
has been necessary to give to the first. 

There is one general observation, how- 
ever, suggested by this argument for 
Agnosticism, which it will be well to 
make in limine. As everybody knows, 
the Agnostic commends himself to men 
by an air of meekness and humility. His 
disclaimer of a much valued knowledge 
which others claim to possess, sounds like 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 113 

the voice of lowly honesty and intellectual 
modesty in a noisy world of self-assertive 
sham and pretence ; and even when he 
assumes the prerogative of rebuke and 
denounces those who will not enter into 
the kingdom of religious nescience, this 
reputation for humility is apt to palliate, 
if it does not altogether condone, the as- 
perity of his chiding, while it may even 
surround him with the halo of a great 
teacher of truth unpalatable to a generation 
of Scribes and Pharisees. Now when the 
Agnostic comes before us no longer either 
as a stern reproving prophet or as a good- 
natured, ironical fellow with a humor for 
negations, but in the guise simply of a 
metaphysician who is to give a reason for 
the faith that is in him, he cannot of course 
claim immunity from any legitimate criti- 
cism to which those expose themselves 
who enter into this dialectical arena. 
And surely no other dogmatist ever laid 
himself open to a juster charge of defying 
his own principles. Something has al- 
ready been said of the astounding specta- 
cle of Agnosticism simulating Gnosticism 
in order to fix the limits of human Knowl- 
edge. But what shall we say when it 



114 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

goes on to set limits to the nature of God 
Himself? Yet this is precisely what is 
done whenever it is asserted that God is 
so constituted that He cannot reveal Him- 
self to the thought of man. How is this 
divine impotency known to the Agnostic 
who knows nothing but the phenomena of 
our sensible experience ? If God is abso- 
lutely inscrutable, how can you say He 
must be of such a nature that He cannot 
make a disclosure of Himself or communi- 
cate with His creatures ? Surely, in this 
proclamation of the Divine dumbness, the 
Agnostic touches at once the climax of 
logical inconsistency and the height of 
intellectual presumption. 

But what ground is there in reality for 
supposing that the Divine Being tran- 
scends the reach and compass of human 
intelligence ? In the theory elaborated 
by Hamilton and Mansel and adopted by 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, this ontological 
argument for religious nescience, though 
buttressed by minor considerations, rests 
for its ultimate foundation upon two 
premises which it is not difficult to isolate 
from the superstructure and its adjacent 
supports. One of these premises asserts 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 115 

that God is Infinite and Absolute ; the 
other asserts that man knows nothing 
but the finite and the relative. The lat- 
ter proposition we have already canvassed 
in another connection. It is derived from 
a false theory of Knowledge, and flies in 
the face of our actual experience. It has 
been shown already that the finite and 
the infinite are known together, and that 
it is as impossible to know one without 
the other as it is to apprehend an angle 
apart from the sides which contain it. 
This is the truth in the much misunder- 
stood doctrine of the Relativity of Knowl- 
edge. But, not to repeat or expand what 
has already been said upon this subject, it 
must here be asserted once for all that 
intelligence is not, and by its very nature 
cannot be, restricted to the finite and the 
relative in any sense which excludes from 
its purview the Infinite and the Absolute. 
These provincial limitations are altogether 
artificial and arbitrary. And with their 
disappearance the sphere of Universal 
Being stands revealed as the proper coun- 
terpart for the boundless scope and em- 
brace of Knowledge. And when this 
point is reached — and it must be reached 



116 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

by all thinkers who accept any knowledge 
of reality as trustworthy — no difficulty 
will be created by that other proposition 
which predicates " Infinite" and " Abso- 
lute " of God. For the Infinite and Abso- 
lute is not that which excludes or negates 
the finite and the relative, it is that which 
takes them up into itself and in whose 
embrace they find their truest being ; as, 
on the other hand, it realizes itself through 
them and would be unknown without 
them. This organic and evolutionary 
view at once of Being and of Thought 
is the true corrective of that ontological 
Agnosticism w^hich derives itself from the 
conception of God as Infinite and Abso- 
lute. If it is the nature of the Infinite 
and Absolute Being to reveal and realize 
Himself in the finite and relative, and if 
it is the nature of intelligence to appre- 
hend these realities, not separately but 
together, how, from such a perfect onto- 
logical and psychological arrangement 
for the meeting of the Divine Being and 
the human mind, can it be inferred that 
they must remain eternally apart ? Man- 
ifestly the thinkers who drew this conclu- 
sion did not so conceive either of God or of 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 111 

human intelligence. Restricting the lat- 
ter to the finite phenomena of space and 
time, — unwarrantably, as we have already 
seen, — they set up oyer against these 
phenomena the image of a reality which 
was not only to transcend them, but which, 
as infinite, was to be merely the negative 
of the finite, and which as absolute was to 
stand out of all relation to it. Such a 
metaphysical idol we can never of course 
know, for it is cunningly devised after 
the pattern of what Knowledge is not. 
Precisely because we are intelligent beings 
must we be ignorant of this nonentity. 
If it were real, and therefore in relation 
to other reality, we should have no trouble 
in knowing it, — were it not that the 
Agnostic objects, forsooth, to knowing 
by means of our intelligence because it 
is a relating intelligence, as though seeing 
should be forbidden to the eyes and en- 
joined upon the hands or ears. To know, 
to think, to comprehend is to compare and 
discriminate — to set one thing against 
another and to note their differences and 
resemblances. It is in this way that 
intelligence has come into possession of 
the intelligible world — finite and infinite 



118 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

alike. Identity and difference are the 
poles about which all knowledge revolves. 
Comparing is the essence of the cognitive 
function. We know man in relation to 
nature and nature in relation to man, and 
we never know either truly till we know 
both in relation to God. But the Agnos- 
tic sets up the invisible picture of a Grrand 
Etre, formless and colorless in itself, ab- 
solutely separated from man and from 
the world — blank within and void with- 
out, — its very existence indistinguishable 
from its non-existence, — and bowing 
down before this idolatrous creation, he 
pours out his soul in lamentations over 
the incognizableness of such a mysterious 
and awful nonentity ! The truth is that 
the Agnostic's abstraction of a deity is 
unknown only because it is unreal. And 
his argument has no bearing upon our 
knowledge of God. The Divine Being, 
whose vesture is nature and whose image 
man ; the Ever-active Creator, in whom we 
and all things live and move and have our 
being ; the Holy Spirit, who nourishes 
the world and communes with the chil- 
dren of men : this Living God is known 
precisely because He does come into re- 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 119 

lation with His creatures ; nor is He 
recognized by the intellect alone — the 
heart owns Him with pious and reverent 
affection, the will bows before His right- 
eous law, and our whole soul, yearning 
as it does for the Father of Spirits, is 
quickened and refreshed by His presence. 
This symphony of response from all sides 
of our nature confirms reason's assurance 
that God is not concealed from mortal 
ken ; that though the infinite depths of 
His being are beyond our present vision, 
we yet see " through a glass darkly 9 ' and, 
while not omniscient, really " know in 
part." Partial as it is, it is this vision of 
the Divine which transfigures the life of 
man on earth. 

Agnosticism is only a transitional and 
temporary phase of thought. The human 
mind can no more surrender its belief in 
God than its belief in a world or in a self. 
Contemporary Agnosticism, strange as it 
may sound, is in part due to the great 
advance which Knowledge has made dur- 
ing the last half century ; it is blindness 
from excess of light. The astonishing 
results of scientific investigation have 



120 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

given us new insight into the physical 
universe and the life of mankind ; and 
though, in consequence of the immanency 
of the Infinite in the finite, every enlarge- 
ment and rectification of our view of man 
and nature must also involve growth in 
our knowledge of God, the first effect of 
this advance has been merely a revolt 
against the partial and inadequate repre- 
sentations of God which popular thought 
has inherited from the ages that antedate 
the birth of modern science. But the 
Agnostic fever seems already to be burn- 
ing out. And as reason cannot escape 
from its three fundamental ideas — nature, 
self, God — and the development of rea- 
son consists in enriching the content of 
each and adjusting them harmoniously to 
one another, it cannot be doubted — and 
the history of human thought confirms 
the expectation — that reason's next step 
will be to modify or reinterpret the idea 
of God so as to inform and harmonize it 
with the revelation which science has de- 
ciphered in the operations of nature and 
the life of humanity. Nay, has not rea- 
son already to some extent accomplished 
her task? Does not the light already 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 121 

shine for all who have eyes to see ? The 
conception of God as spiritual and not 
mechanical ; as immanent not external ; 
as working by law not by caprice, and 
with steady infinite patience not by ca- 
tastrophic outbursts ; as adumbrated in 
nature and revealed in the moral and 
spiritual qualities of man, who is the goal 
of evolution and the epitome and abridg- 
ment of existence : is not this conception, 
in combination with the idea of the Divine 
Fatherhood (which is the essence of Chris- 
tianity), taking possession of the best 
spirits in the modern world and dislodg- 
ing the Agnosticism by which it was pre- 
ceded and by which, in a sense, it was 
originated? Even the greatest of living 
Agnostics, — Mr. Herbert Spencer, — while 
still strenuously denying that we know 
anything about God, yet advances so far 
as to posit the existence of God as indis- 
pensable first principle both of knowing 
and of being. 

But apart from the peculiar perplexity 
into which our age has been brought by 
the attempt to assimilate such an unpar- 
alleled mass of new knowledge, both of 
ourselves and of the world, Agnosticism 



122 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

now, as in the past, has been provoked by, 
and is a reaction from, the excessive dog- 
matism of metaphysical theology. Indeed, 
many half-educated persons call them- 
selves Agnostics merely to indicate that 
they do not believe the thirty-nine arti- 
cles or some other churchly creed. The 
shepherds of the flock, judged by the arti- 
cles of faith, make such claims to omnis- 
cience that the silly sheep, in sheer recoil, 
delight to browse on nescience. The 
theologians have sown the wind of 
Gnosticism, and they are reaping the 
whirlwind of Agnosticism. The harvest 
will compel them — it is now compelling 
them — to reconsider what and how they 
sow. And the analysis already made by 
the late Dr. Hatch in his "Hibbert Lect- 
ures " awakens the hope that Christian 
theology, having at last become conscious 
of its origin and nature, will slough off 
what this learned writer designates its 
damnosa Kereditas: its affectation of in- 
fallible metaphysics ; its supposition that 
the Christian revelation, which is the set- 
ting forth of certain facts, authenticates 
and guarantees speculations which are 
built upon those facts. The speculative 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 123 

habit was foreign to primitive Christian- 
ity. It is the invincible residuum with 
which the Greek world, though van- 
quished, endowed the victorious Christian 
church. The tendency to uncontrolled 
speculation had been inwrought into the 
intellectual fibre of the time through the 
pervasive influence of Greek ideas ; and 
Christianity could, of course, be received 
only through this medium of apprehen- 
sion. The Sermon on the Mount pro- 
claimed a new law of life ; it assumed 
religious and ethical conceptions without 
attempting to justify or even to formu- 
late them; it contained no articles of 
faith ; it knew nothing of metaphysics or 
speculative theology. From this simple 
starting-point, as Dr. Hatch shows, the 
speculative habit which the Greeks had 
ingrained in the mind of the world engen- 
dered the abstract and dogmatic meta- 
physics of the Nicene Creed. To a unity 
of belief in the fundamental facts of Chris- 
tianity, which was insisted upon from the 
first, succeeded the demand for a unifor- 
mity of speculations in regard to those 
facts. " The holding of approved opin- 
ions was elevated to a position at first 



124 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

co-ordinate with, and at last superior to, 
trust in God and the effort to live a holy- 
life. " This is the bequest of Greece to 
Christian thought which Dr. Hatch char- 
acterizes as the damnosa liereditas. " It 
has," he says, " given to later Christian- 
ity that part of it which is doomed to 
perish, and which yet, while it lives, 
holds the key of the prison-house of many 
souls." 1 It is that part also, we must add, 
which has been most prolific of Agnosti- 
cism. The claim of the church to pos- 
session of an infallible knowledge has 
involved it in warfare with natural sci- 
ence and with historical scholarship. And 
so far as Agnosticism represents not reli- 
gious nescience, but freedom of thought 
and inquiry, it has deservedly triumphed 
at every point. The church is learning 
to leave to science and scholarship the 
things that are theirs. But it needs, if 
Agnosticism is to be completely disarmed, 

1 The Hibbert Lectures, 1888. The Influence of 
Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church. By the late 
Edwin Hatch, D.D., Reader in Ecclesiastical History 
in the University of Oxford. — The quotations are 
from Lecture V, on which other historical statements 
of this paragraph are also based. 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 125 

to learn one other lesson : namely, that 
as the religious life is vastly more impor- 
tant than the intellectual apprehension of 
its nature or conditions, so no interest of 
religion demands that we shall define pre- 
cisely or circumscribe with a fence of 
words the Infinite Personality that lies 
beneath our faith and worship. It is 
forgotten that we know only "in part." 
Furthermore, for religion, as for art and 
life, the Vague has as much worth and 
significance as the Definite. It is other- 
wise with science, whose organ is the 
intellect. But it is a mere prejudice of 
the intellect — a prejudice against which 
the feelings and imagination must always 
protest — that we should deem what is 
vague to be less real than what is definite. 
On the contrary, the Vague is, in actual 
experience, not seldom far more real. 
And those who, in ignorance of this 
truth, endeavor to compress it into fixed 
categories of thought, are always in dan- 
ger of dissipating its essence. The theo- 
logical habit of defining what is known 
only " in part " and setting up the defini- 
tions as standards of orthodoxy, is a seri- 
ous danger to true religion. As such 



126 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

metaphysical dogmas multiply, Agnosti- 
cism must abound. 

But though theological omniscience has 
been a most fruitful cause of religious 
nescience, it remains, lastly, to mention 
another influence which, though less obvi- 
ous, has been no less potent. It may be 
described as the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the 
age, the whole form and pressure of the 
time. Ours is an era of material progress, 
of useful inventions, of great practical am- 
bitions and achievements. We have anni- 
hilated space and time and made force and 
matter our docile servants. But the hand 
is subdued to what it works in ; and these 
material operations and utilitarian ends 
have undoubtedly reacted upon our own 
spirits. They have imbued us with me- 
chanical modes of thought and material 
standards of worth. They make it conceiv- 
able that man himself is only a machine — 
a somewhat finer machine than the prod- 
ucts of his own skill ! Now with this con- 
ception of personality and this estimate of 
human dignity, faith in man and faith in 
God cannot easily survive : and Agnosti- 
cism is then merely the outward record of 
a spiritual paralysis already accomplished. 



PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 127 

And to this blight of practical material- 
ism came, as ally, the Darwinian doctrine 
of the descent of man. Whether cor- 
rectly or not, Darwin's hypothesis was in- 
terpreted as degrading man from little 
less than angel to little more than ape. 
That such an animal should be the image 
and revelation of God, seemed incredible. 
As Pascal has well said, it is dangerous to 
let man see too clearly how he is on a level 
with the animals without showing him his 
greatness. The effect in the present case 
was the rise of an evolutionary Agnosti- 
cism which strengthened the Agnosticism 
of everyday life and interest. And both 
were reinforced by the Agnosticism of 
certain men of science who insisted on re- 
serving the appellation of " knowledge " 
for the mechanical processes of weighing, 
counting, timing, and measuring. Alto- 
gether the general spirit of the age, both 
on its practical and theoretical side, has 
been strikingly favorable to the rise of 
Agnosticism. 

But the historical and psychological 
causes which produce a dogma are not at 
the same time a guarantee of its truth. 
The premises of Agnosticism we have 



128 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 

already shown to be false. When the 
baselessness of this dogma, which is seem- 
ingly so modest yet really so presumptu- 
ous, comes to be generally recognized, we 
may expect to see it disappear. And un- 
less all signs are misleading, the night is 
already far spent and the dawn is at hand. 
But, as we strain our eyes to catch the 
first glimpses of the blessed morn, let us 
remember that, but for its humiliation and 
chastening in the valley of the shadow of 
Agnosticism, the human mind would not 
in our generation have initiated the most 
important reform since the Reformation, — 
the substitution of the spiritual religion of 
Christ for the speculative religion of Chris- 
tendom. 



PART III 

SPIRITUAL RELIGION: ITS EVO- 
LUTION AND ESSENCE 



" But the hour cometh, and now is y when the 
true worshippers shall worship the Father in 
spirit and in truth." 

129 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 1 

Every now and then we hear the 
requiem of religion chanted alike by the 
spirits who mock and by the pious souls 
who have " no language but a cry." I sup- 
pose we shall always have professional 
mourners. But it is greatly to be desired 
that their services should not be prema- 
turely given. If there is anything in the 
world that is alive and active, it is just 
this religious spirit for whose demise cer- 
tain mourners go about the streets. The 
body of religion changes, the spirit and 
the life abide forever. To the assertion 
that religion is defunct, I reply by pointing 
to the intense interest which men to-day 
everywhere feel in religion. It was re- 
cently stated by a Massachusetts judge — 
Burke observed truly that we Americans 

1 This address was first given before the Liberal 
Club of Buffalo, and afterwards before a similar 
club in Boston. 

131 



132 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

like to appeal to the law — that there is 
nothing in the world perennially interest- 
ing but religion. The ground of this 
dictum is to be found in the constitution 
of humanity ; for the human soul which 
the things of sense fail to satisfy can 
attain its true home and its complete self- 
realization only in conscious communion 
with the Spirit behind the veil. What 
better evidence of the vitality of religion 
is needed than the fact that millions of 
our people go every Sunday to church, 
notwithstanding the crudeness of so many 
ecclesiastical dogmas and the sonorous 
inanities of so many pulpits? Men are 
too strongly convinced of the reality and 
significance of religion to be driven out of 
the temple by a caricature of its heart-up- 
lifting services and ordinances. Further- 
more, I assert, as a matter of observation, 
that there is no topic — not even politics, 
and still less science — on which men are 
so anxious to be instructed. Man feels 
himself akin to the All-Father, and he 
would fain know more of the conditions 
of his sonship. 

There are, no doubt, religious changes. 
But change is a sign of life. What is 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 133 

dead is rigid and fixed. What lives 
grows, develops, and realizes its essence 
through differentiation. In this respect 
the development of religion is analogous 
to that of philosophy, science, art, or any 
other element of civilization. Compare 
the science of to-day with the science of 
the age of savagery. The investigation 
of nature's laws merely for the sake of 
knowing them would have seemed to 
primitive man an insane pursuit. The 
goal of his endeavor was to fill an empty 
stomach and so maintain a precarious ex- 
istence. If he used his mental faculties, 
if he observed and made inferences, it was 
to procure food, to escape perils, and to 
overcome rivals. For fallacious reason- 
ing, for imperfect observation, the penalty 
was death. In that universal struggle for 
existence, only those properly adapted to 
the environment could survive. This is 
the reason why there is so much truth and 
wisdom in . what we call the vulgar, or 
common-sense, view of things. It is the 
deposit of the experience of the race tested 
by its adequacy for life. But this com- 
mon knowledge kept all the time expand- 
ing. In ministering to their physical 



134 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

wants, men were unwittingly in the ser- 
vice of the ideal. They noticed their five 
fingers, and invented arithmetic. They 
measured land, and originated geometry. 
They used the lever, and discovered the 
first principles of physics. They watched 
their flocks under the kindly eyes of night, 
and, looking upward, they dreamed of the 
secrets of the heavens. Astronomy is our 
most perfect science. By it we regulate 
our watches, take our bearings at sea and 
on land, and predict solar and lunar 
eclipses. Think of the astronomer, if you 
would realize vividly the growth of human 
knowledge from its beginnings with our 
rude progenitors, who could not count 
their fingers ! The poor savage had no 
chronometer but his stomach. As a 
matter of fact, he measured the lapse of 
time by the recurrence of hunger. The 
word "meal" means originally "time." 
And the reduplication " meal-time," which 
is not merely a peculiarity of our lan- 
guage, shows that the sense of time in 
primitive man was pregnantly stomachic. 
Time ! Time ! ! like the rising reverbera- 
tion of a dinner-bell! The measurement 
of time amongst ourselves is astronomical ; 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 135 

amongst our earliest ancestors it was gas- 
tronomical. Would you see at a glance 
the evolution of human science? Then 
note its rise in an empty stomach and its 
progress, often slow and always toilsome, 
to the mastery of the laws of the celestial 
universe. 

Man has evolved, the arts have evolved, 
science has evolved. Evolution means 
growth and progress ; there is nothing 
but has evolved anywhere in this universe 
of God. It would be strange, indeed, 
were there no evolution of religion. I 
care not how one defines religion, whether 
one fills it with superstition or empties it 
of everything but emotion ; whatever it 
is, it has come to be what it is, it has had 
a history, and it is now in process of 
development. 

Look first at the development of relig- 
ion in the individual mind. The mind of 
the child is wax, on which parents and 
nurses and teachers set their seal. Our 
earliest education consists in appropriating 
the ideas and beliefs of those about us. 
Children get many of them, more or less 
consciously, with language ; and their 
mimetic instinct, joined with their curi- 



136 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

osity, keeps them constantly adding to 
the first stock. How much there is for 
any one mind to learn from the mind of 
the race ! A lifetime would be insufficient 
for any one of us to acquire and assimilate 
the mental products which the previous 
generations have transmitted. The utility 
of such general information is also obvious 
enough. Yet I wish to point out that 
something else besides the absorption of 
pre-existing material is required to make 
a man. Unquestioning recipiency, how- 
ever far you carry it, is only the infantile 
stage of education. Many persons, per- 
haps the majority, never go very much 
farther ; they believe what they are told, 
and consider themselves learned when 
they have been told a great deal. I know 
an encyclopaedic professor of theology 
who said to a doubting student: "Sir, 
I never had a doubt in my life." That 
man's mind was like the mind of a little 
child, not in its guilelessness, which is a 
Christian virtue, but in its absolute de- 
pendence upon others' thought. 

The great Teacher bade men live each 
his own individual life, heedless of the 
rules and traditions of Scribes and Phari- 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 137 

sees. This is the second stage in the 
development of the soul. The first stage 
is that of acquiescence and absorption in 
custom, tradition, inherited beliefs, and 
sacrosanct formulae. These are our first 
schoolmasters ; and the discipline they 
give us is invaluable. The impression 
they make is so deep and lasting that 
many persons never pass to the higher 
stage of free and independent manhood. 
Yet there is probably in every mind a 
certain growth in this direction. In the 
best minds the tendency is so strong 
that it issues in what, considering its 
nature and its effects, we may designate 
a spiritual puberty. It is a coming of 
age of the master of the house, who has 
hitherto been kept in leading-strings. 
He is disposed to call everybody to 
account. He despises tradition, sneers 
at custom, doubts the certainties of the 
creeds, and finds that nothing is indubi- 
table on earth or in heaven. The assimi- 
lating soul has become reactive ; the 
unchained Titan flings himself against 
every restraining authority. This is the 
stage of doubt that follows in normal 
mental development — if this develop- 



138 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

ment is carried along naturally — upon 
the stage of credulity and acquiescence. 

In some form, though not perhaps in 
this violent degree, every thoughtful youth 
must be conscious of such an experience. 
It is, certainly, no uncommon thing to see 
the credulity and submission of youth 
give way to doubt, denial, and fire-eyed 
defiance. But this is an abnormal condi- 
tion of the soul ; from the nature of the 
case, it cannot endure. It is, in fact, 
the hurricane which precedes the settled 
calm ; it is the darkness of chaos ere the 
spirit says, "Let there be light." The 
third stage of mental development — 
happy is he who attains thereunto ! — 
consists in the readjustment of the old 
material to the new, in the discovery of 
a higher standpoint, in the attainment of 
an ultimate view of things broad enough 
to embrace all the facts we know of man 
and nature and God, in such harmonious 
relations as will satisfy the demands of 
the scientific intellect and the yearnings 
of that human heart whereby we live. 

Credulity, doubt, reasoned belief, or 
faith: these are the three phases of mental 
development, and, therefore, they are the 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 139 

three stages of the evolution of religion in 
the individual soul. The child lives by 
faith as by his mother's milk; the youth, 
conscious of strength, revolts against the 
powers that have held him in tutelage; 
the man regains peace by a larger knowl- 
edge and a riper experience, through 
which the youth's doubt is overcome and 
the child's faith essentially vindicated. 
Scepticism is, we may say, only a halting- 
place, not a goal; it is the growing-pains 
of the spirit. 

Agnosticism is the apotheosis of scep- 
ticism. It is scepticism as a creed, as 
a system, as an ultimate resting-place. 
Those who proclaim it strangely misread 
the processes and the conditions of our 
spiritual life. They make the aimless 
gropings of the youthful intellect an ideal 
for the thinking of mature men. Only, 
instead of the awful earnestness of the in- 
quiring youth, they often affect an indiffer- 
ence to the great problems which oppress 
him. As though we could be indifferent 
to the highest interests of the human 
spirit! So long as life lasts, so long must 
we strive to grasp the ultimate truth of 
things. To shut our eyes to problems is 



140 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

an ostrich policy. Man is called by an 
inner voice to strive, and strive, and strive, 
and not to yield. Agnosticism would 
eradicate this noble endeavor. Its only 
justification, so far as I can see, is that 
men never attain the absolute truth, but 
only make successive approximations to it. 
But this very fact indicates with reason- 
able clearness that God meant our life to 
be one of constant and progressive en- 
deavor. Such was, in the last century, 
the faith of Lessing, and, in this, of 
Browning. Our religious thought is to 
be on the growth. The complaint that 
no system is final rests upon a misappre- 
hension of the nature of thought ; for 
thought realizes itself only in continuous 
progression. The evolution of religious 
belief is necessitated alike by the constitu- 
tion of the mind and by the inexhaustible 
character of the divine object of religion. 
Agnosticism is a passing fever of juvenile 
free-thinking. 

So much, then, of evolution from the 
point of view of the individual soul. But 
religion has also an objective side. It is 
a system of doctrine and worship em- 
bodied in the creeds and rituals of the 



SPIUITUAL RELIGION 141 

churches. When we speak of the evolu- 
tion of religion, it is of this body of 
dogmas we think first. After the sketch 
I have given of the development of relig- 
ion in the individual mind, it will not be 
so difficult to trace the development of 
religion as an objective system and insti- 
tution, that is, as an established doctrine 
and mode of worship. Hitherto we have 
regarded religion as a process in the mind 
of the single person ; now we are to re- 
gard it as a product of the mind of hu- 
manity. 

The first thing to be noted in the early 
history of religions is that dogma occupies 
a quite inconspicuous position. With the 
history of Christianity before our eyes, 
this statement seems paradoxical. But 
the fact is that Christianity differs from 
all earlier religions in its insistence on 
articles of faith. Yet this dogmatic spirit, 
as modern criticism shows, was a late 
development in the Christian church, and 
a foreign graft upon primitive Christian- 
ity. Not belief, but ritual, is the key- 
note of primitive religions. Their essence 
is a cult, not a creed. They prescribe 
modes in which God's anger may be 



142 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

averted or His favor enjoyed. It is true 
that all religion presupposes the exist- 
ence of God. But I firmly believe that 
no rational being has ever permanently 
doubted, or will ever continuously doubt, 
the existence of God, though men have 
called Him by different names, which best 
seemed to them to express the infinitude 
of His nature. 

Certainly for the primitive races of men, 
God was an ever-present, a never-ques- 
tioned reality. They conceived of Him in 
the two ways which all later thinking has 
followed, either as a Great Human Spirit 
or as a Great Natural Power, though never 
exclusively one or the other. Under the 
latter aspect, God was terrible as the dev- 
astating storm or the rattling thunder; 
under the former, He was the mild and 
kindly Father of the tribe. According 
to their experience and environment, 
primitive men inclined to the one or to 
the other of these conceptions of the God- 
head. The tribes that personified the 
powers of nature dwelt in fear and trem- 
bling, with a haunting sense of alienation 
from the terrible Ruler of the world, 
though with the conviction also that the 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 143 

God might be rendered friendly. The 
tribes that practised ancestor-worship, 
making God their Father, enjoyed a sense 
of union and communion with the Divine 
Spirit, who deigned to join them at the 
common meal and sit with them round 
the common hearth. For either class of 
worshippers religion consisted in cult, 
and in cult only. There, religion meant 
the rites and ceremonies — many of them 
very absurd — by which the hostile nature- 
God was won over to friendship with 
man. Here, religion meant the pouring 
out of libations and the offering of food 
to the ancestor-God who guarded the 
homes of his children. In both cases 
religion consisted of practices, not of be- 
liefs. There was room for hetero-praxy, 
or an error in ritual ; but there was no 
room for hetero-doxy, or an error in belief. 
Hence among the Greeks, — who are the 
authors of art, science, literature, and 
philosophy, who, in fact, originated all 
occidental civilization with the single ex- 
ception of religion, — the notion of " her- 
esy" was absolutely unknown. There 
could be no heretic in the primitive world. 
Cult was the first stage in the evolution 
of religion. 



144 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

The second stage is that of creed or 
dogma. This is a step in advance of cult 
or ritual : for it presupposes considerable 
development of the intellect. I have 
already said that cults imply the elements 
of a creed, — God's existence and man's 
power of influencing God; but this be- 
lief is implicit, latent, unconscious, and 
overlaid by ritual. It becomes explicit 
and predominant with the growth of hu- 
man experience and reflection. The creed 
may be the philosophy of a pre-existing 
ritual. If so, belief in the creed becomes as 
necessary as the performance of the ritual. 
But the creed may transcend national 
traditions ; it may offer a new theory of 
God's will concerning man or of man's 
relation to God. Thus the Hebrew 
prophets of the eighth and following cen- 
turies endeavored to teach the nation, 
which had given itself up to forms, that 
God sought justice, mercy, and truth, and 
could not away with their sacrifices and 
burnt offerings. The burden of the Gos- 
pels, again, is just the fatherliness of God 
and the revelation of His love to man. 

But such simple, undeveloped creeds are 
not the most striking varieties of the spe- 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 145 

cies. For these we must have a body of 
doctrines, belief in which is necessary to 
salvation. The perfect dogmatist declares 
that we are saved by faith ; and by faith 
he means acceptance of a number of 
propositions formulated by some council 
or synod. The believer wins Heaven ; 
the doubter — let him be anathema ! 
Among Mohammedans, the standards re- 
quire acceptance of the Prophet as the 
messenger of God. It is not so easy to 
describe the creed of the Christian church. 
For, unlike the Mohammedan, the Chris- 
tian nations have been characterized by 
progress, and progress means more vitality. 
That which lives changes and varies. The 
creed of Christendom is not fixed, but 
plastic ; it is not one, but many. Only 
death gives the rigidity and uniformity 
which those good souls desire who are 
always seeking the living among the dead. 
A living religion is like an organic species; 
it never is but is always becoming ; it is 
always passing into new varieties. What 
life there has been in Christianity to pro- 
duce all the creeds of Christendom, — 
the creed of the Catholic, the creed of the 
Protestant, the creed of the Episcopalian, 



146 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

the creed of the Presbyterian, the creed of 
the Independent, the creed of the Quaker, 
and the creeds of all the forgotten denomi- 
nations whom the church outlawed for 
heresy ! But one thing is common to all 
these doctrinaires : they hold that dogma 
is the essence of religion, and each claims 
that his dogma is not merely truth but the 
truth. Religion is right belief, or ortho- 
doxy ; and orthodoxy is my " doxy," while 
a " doxy " other than mine is heterodoxy. 
The stage of creed is higher than the 
stage of cult. We must also observe that 
the lower is taken up in the higher, as an 
instrument for its expression. Thus in 
the historic church of Rome, while dogma 
is the soul, ritual is the body of religion. 
The rites and ceremonies which constitute 
the religion of cult, as well as the beliefs 
they imply, are absorbed, and not only 
absorbed but transcended, by the relig- 
ion of creed. But not only does this 
latter make dogma the primary and es- 
sential element of religion, it also multi- 
plies indefinitely the articles of faith. I 
cannot here analyze the creeds of the 
churches. It will suffice to observe that, 
howsoever they may differ in details of 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 147 

doctrine, they all agree in furnishing a 
theory of the Divine existence and govern- 
ment, a theory of the origin and destina- 
tion of man, and a theory of the creation, 
course, and final purpose of the world. 

These are all vast, nay, they are infinite 
subjects ; and it is not surprising that the 
religious mind, in grappling with them, 
should have fallen short of the absolute 
truth. What else could have been ex- 
pected ? Certainly the natural under- 
standing is prone to error ; and, even if 
we suppose God to have made a supra- 
natural communication to chosen spirits, 
we can only apprehend as much of that 
message as our finite intellects can com- 
pass. In other words, given a revelation, 
or given no revelation, our knowledge of 
the ultimate mystery of things is but par- 
tial, provisional, and true in a relative 
sense. In the past the churches have all 
sinned through ignoring this consideration. 
They have claimed to be in possession of 
the final and absolute truth about nearly 
everything. The Christian churches knew 
that the earth stands still, with heaven 
above and hell beneath. They knew that 
the world was created in six days, and so 



148 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

much of it each clay. They knew exactly 
how the first man and the first woman 
came into existence. They knew how 
languages originated. They knew why 
men must toil and sweat, and why it is 
that boj 7 s kill snakes. Nor was it to these 
problems of nature alone that the religion 
of dogma furnished ready-made answers ; 
these indeed were only episodes in its main 
theme. Its peculiar boast was that it fur- 
nished a revelation of the will of God and 
of God's doings in nature and in human 
history. In the books of the Old and New 
Testament it possessed the truth, final, 
complete, and absolute, about all things 
of any importance in the life of man and 
God. These infallible oracles came from 
God Himself, who inspired the authors. 
The church was as sure of the actual 
authors as we are of the writers of current 
literature. Moses wrote the Pentateuch ; 
Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes ; David wrote 
the Psalms ; Job and Isaiah composed the 
works that bear their names. 

The arrogance of this dogmatism is 
hastening the close of the second stage 
of religion. It is the pride of intellect 
that goes before confusion and discom- 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 149 

fiture. Dogma has conjured up the 
avenger, doubt. Men now begin, where 
they are thoughtful and serious, to 
ask whether religion has not had its 
day, whether the future generations 
will not be godless, whether the uni- 
verse, which seems to us divine, will not 
turn out to be an atheistic machine. 
France well reflects the Zeitgeist; the 
youthful philosopher of the new genera- 
tion, the late M. Guyau, has left us a 
brilliant work on " The Irreligion of the 
Future." Be the future what it may, 
there are few of the dogmas once held dear 
that now strike us as axiomatic. Astron- 
omy has set the earth spinning, dislocated 
heaven and hell, and whirled man from the 
centre of the spatial universe. Biology 
and geology have revolutionized our views 
of the origin of our race and of the cosmos. 
History and criticism have made the Bible 
a new book, or rather a new collection of 
books, written, for the most part, we know 
not by what authors or at what dates, and 
put together, as a Bible, we know not on 
what principle. All the old landmarks, 
Moses, Solomon, Job, are gone ; and a 
restless sea of criticism threatens to engulf 



150 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

religion with the records it adored. This 
is the so-called " warfare " of science and 
religion. For him who has eyes to see, 
the religion of dogma lies exhausted on 
the field. 

Shall we then despair ? Lift up thine 
eyes towards the eastern sky and see what 
light is breaking just beneath the horizon. 
It is the star which the wise men of yore 
beheld and followed. That mildly glow- 
ing radiance is the immortal genius of re- 
ligion. Once eclipsed by nebulous ritual 
and dogma, it shines now, and will shine 
upon future generations, in its own inef- 
fable beauty and purity. Itself the breath 
of God, its kindly light will cheer and 
gladden the hearts of all the children of 
God. Religion is life and spirit. It has 
long been buried beneath creeds and su- 
perstitions of men's device ; it now bursts 
its cerements, and comes forth a glorified 
reality. The decay of dogma is the resur- 
rection of spiritual religion. 

Religion is life with God ; dogma is a 
theory of that life. The mistake of the 
theologians has been in supposing that 
there could be no religious life without 
a correct theory of life. As though there 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 151 

could be no digestion without a knowledge 
of physiology, or no imagination without 
a knowledge of psychology ! Dogma was 
intended to nourish and support religion ; 
its kindness, alas, choked and suffocated 
her. The creeds were meant to be the 
defensive fortifications of religion ; alas, 
that they should have turned their artil- 
lery against the citadel itself ! But spirit 
cannot be captured by mechanism. Life 
outlives the theories that would tear out 
the heart of its secret. 

" Grau, thener Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
Und griin des Lebens gold'ner Baum." 

The third and final stage of religion, 
which is now dawning upon us, cannot 
be so easily described as its predecessors. 
The religion of cult and the religion of 
dogma are things of the past : and it is a 
striking fact that we never know things 
thoroughly till we have gone beyond them 
in our experience. There is a sort of 
antinomy between living and knowing* 
"Has been," not "is," is the badge of all 
our knowledge, especially in the realm of 
human life. The religion of to-day, there- 
fore, will be better understood by future 



152 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

inquirers than by us who experience it. 
But it seems to me that it may be de- 
scribed, not inaccurately and not too 
vaguely, as the religion of spirit. Dog- 
matic religion is retreating ; spiritual re- 
ligion is advancing. Henceforth we shall 
call that man religious who, be his belief 
and knowledge what they may, is pos- 
sessed of a sense of union and fellowship 
with God. In the coming ages of per- 
fected Christianity, religion will be defined 
as a man's permanent attitude and frame 
of mind towards the All-Father. 

But, while it is true that we cannot de- 
scribe very adequately the religion of to- 
day because it is a part of our life, of one 
thing we may be assured, that it has not 
broken with the past and will not be alien 
to the future development of religion. 
In the historical world there is no solution 
of continuity. The religion of dogma 
took up the religion of cult. The Roman 
Catholic Church, which holds belief in 
certain doctrines essential to salvation, at 
the same time uses ritual for the expres- 
sion of its creed and worship. So in the 
religion of to-day, though spirit rises su- 
perior to dogma and to cult, it does not 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 153 

repudiate its convictions or wage a puri- 
tanic war against symbols. Spiritual re- 
ligion will part with none of the elements 
which have entered constitutively into the 
development of the religious conscious- 
ness. We must be very careful to define 
accurately the mutual relations of the 
three stages of religion. They differ, not 
in elements, but in emphasis. In the re- 
ligion of cult, the emphasis fell on actions 
of a certain kind, that is, on ritual observ- 
ances. The worshippers performed the 
rites under the influence of certain beliefs, 
indeed, and in a certain frame of mind; 
both of these, however, remained latent 
and unconscious. The religion of creed 
lays stress on belief in dogma as essential 
to salvation ; but it rejoices in the use of 
symbols, and it assumes, though not very 
consciously or explicitly, that a sound faith 
and a correct ritual will issue in a pious, 
God-fearing life. Now in the final devel- 
opment of religion, it will be explicitly 
recognized that its primary and constitu- 
tive element is neither cult nor creed, but 
what I may call the soul's entire attitude 
towards the Invisible, — an attitude which, 
in its highest attainment, embraces the 



154 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

creature's sense of dependence upon the 
Creator, the child's loving and reverent 
trust in the Father, and the man's fellow- 
ship with the Divine Companion who 
alone can satisfy the boundless and im- 
mortal yearnings of the human spirit. 

To prevent misapprehension, it may be 
noted in passing that spiritual religion is 
something very different from ethical or 
humanitarian culture. The enthusiasm of 
humanity is, indeed, the certain outcome 
of deep fellowship with the Father of 
Spirits, as we may see in Paul and Luther 
and many a less distinguished preacher of 
the gospel. It is a blessed characteristic 
of our own age that religion has come to 
express itself so nobly in practical well- 
doing. But beneficence is not piety. To 
make the love of man the essence of relig- 
ion, is to misread the latter and to divest 
the former of its supreme spiritual dy- 
namic. If the religious man is a benedic- 
tion to earth, it is because his soul is 
bathed in the dews of heaven. 

We have now traced the growth of 
religion as a process in the individual 
consciousness and as a product of the ob- 
jectifying reason of mankind. We have 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 155 

found that, as a process, religious life 
passes from credulity to doubt and from 
doubt to faith ; and that, as a product, 
religion develops from cult to dogma and 
from dogma to spirit. These two lines of 
development are parallel. In the life of 
the mind doubt is higher than credulity, 
while faith carries us beyond both to those 
indubitable intuitions which are the con- 
stitutive factors of intelligence. Simi- 
larly, in the external sphere, doctrines are 
higher than ceremonies, though from the 
highest standpoint each gives us only the 
letter which kills, while it is spirit alone 
that makes alive. Finally, credulity and 
doubt correspond to the religion of cult 
and dogma, while open-eyed faith and 
reasonable hope are the struggling soul's 
response to the religion of spirit. Indeed, 
spiritual religion, which we have described 
as the late fruit of the tree of objective 
institutions and creeds, cannot be distin- 
guished from that highest phase of re- 
ligious life which, in the mind of the 
individual, supervenes upon credulity and 
doubt. At this point objective and sub- 
jective religion are one and the same. To 
the religion of spirit, therefore, — a relig- 



156 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

ion which is in the soul and for the soul, 

— we majr conceive historical progress 
and psychological development alike to be 
tending. When, from the least to the 
greatest, all shall in this way " know the 
Lord," the millennium, in which all good 
men believe at least as an ideal, will actu- 
ally have come upon us. 

Towards this goal the race is slowly but 
steadily advancing. The religion of cult 
has vanished from the civilized world. 
Civilization is characterized by a subordi- 
nation of the physical to the mental ; it 
puts material things to spiritual uses. 
The civilized man has come to himself. 
He can no longer be satisfied with mere 
external rites and ceremonies. They must 
be informed by thoughts. The religion 
of dogma becomes a necessity. It will 
probably long remain a necessity even for 
a considerable portion of Christendom. 
It is the religion of elementary reflection, 

— the religion which asks and answers 
questions about the deep things of God 
with equal readiness and assurance. Its 
questions appall the critical, but its an- 
swers satisfy the multitude. Indeed, 
dogmatic religion owes its security to the 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 157 

fact that man yearns for definitive and ex- 
act information about his own origin and 
destiny. By a well-known psychological 
law, the yearning predisposes him to ac- 
cept any theory, but especially one claim- 
ing authority and finality. The religion 
of dogma has, therefore, always appealed 
to a supranatural revelation. Behind this 
intrenchment it is impregnable, even in 
the gross form of Mormonism, so long as 
the masses of mankind are swayed more 
by personal hopes and fears than by in- 
sight and love of truth. But the spirit of 
inquiry cannot be permanently repressed ; 
and in recent times it has dared to investi- 
gate the nature and grounds of revelation. 
The answer of the Roman Catholic Church 
was the decree of Papal Infallibility. The 
effect of this decree was to reassert the 
identity of religion with belief in divinely 
revealed doctrine, and to furnish an infal- 
lible expounder and interpreter of this 
doctrine. It committed the larger portion 
of Christendom irrevocably to the religion 
of dogma, for which, indeed, it had always 
consistently stood in the past. The Ro- 
man Catholic Church, rich in the reas- 
sured inheritance of nineteen centuries, 



158 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

confronts the rising spirit of liberal relig- 
ion with a serenity and confidence dis- 
turbed only by contempt. 

The summary procedure adopted by the 
Roman Catholic Church was not available 
for Protestantism. The reformers had 
appealed from ecclesiastical authority and 
tradition to reason, and especially to the 
Bible. They failed to observe that these 
new authorities could not withdraw them- 
selves from investigation. The " all-de- 
stroying " Kant dissected the human mind, 
and asserted the incapacity of reason to 
know anything of itself, or to demonstrate, 
even with the aid of other powers, the 
existence of God or the immortality of 
the soul. The image of the Bible, which 
Protestantism adored, fell to pieces in the 
hands of critics who wrenched from it the 
secret of its origin, structure, and diversi- 
fied meaning and purpose. We have, I 
am very sure, a nobler Bible than we lost 
and a diviner faculty than Kant denied. 
But, in view of the revolutionary work of 
critical science, scholarship and philosophy, 
— a work demanded by the spirit of Prot- 
estantism, — it is no longer possible for 
any Protestant sect to wave the banner of 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 159 

final and infallible authority in matters of 
religion. Protestantism, in all its forms, 
originated in the assertion of creeds or 
polities ; but the spirit of Protestantism 
has always carried it beyond its starting- 
points. Its history is the record of a 
growing disinclination to that dogmatic 
apprehension of religion which it owes to 
the Church of Rome. 

This tendency can be illustrated by a 
glance at the history of American Chris- 
tianity. 1 At the beginning of the Revo- 
lution the whole number of religious 
organizations existing in the Colonies is 
estimated to have been about nineteen 
hundred and fifty, or one for every seven- 
teen hundred souls. The creed of three 
fourths of these churches, Congregational, 
Baptist, Presbyterian, and other, was Cal- 
vinism; while of the remainder some three 
hundred churches professed the faith of 
the Church of England. Methodism had 
scarcely gained a footing in the country; 
and the Catholics had not more than 
twenty-six priests with twice as many 

1 The historical data which follow are taken from 
Diman's Orations and Essays, pp. 201-264. (The 
census is that of 1870.) 



160 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

congregations. If anything seemed prob- 
able in the future, it was the ascendency 
of the Calvinistic creed. 

Now what American history shows is 
the decay of this creed, and, with it, of 
all merely creedal religion. The Metho- 
dists, who had no existence here at the 
time of the Revolution, are to-day the 
largest religious body in the land. The 
growth of Methodism may be attributed 
in part to its effective organization and 
in part to the missionary zeal of its 
preachers ; but there can be no doubt 
that its main source of success is to be 
found in its appeal to the feelings and 
in its disparagement of the intellect in 
which Calvinism lay intrenched. The 
Baptists, who are nominally Calvinists, 
are now, as they were at the beginning 
of the century, second in numerical rank; 
but their fundamental principle, — the 
Bible, the Bible only, — taken in con- 
nection with their polity, has enabled 
them silently to drop the old theology 
and unconsciously to adjust themselves 
to the new spiritual environment. The 
Congregationalists, who, at the begin- 
ning of the Revolution, were by far the 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 161 

strongest and most numerous of all re- 
ligious bodies, are now one of the minor 
denominations in point of numbers. 
With them the process of adaptation 
was more difficult, for the body had a 
deeply ingrained and inherited theo- 
logical habit. But, after producing Uni- 
tarianism and Transcendentalism, the 
sturdy mother also made her peace with 
the anti-dogmatic tendency of the age. 

There remain of the larger denomina- 
tions who made profession of the ancient 
creed only the Presbyterians. And they 
have more than held their own during 
the century. The steady growth of this 
religious body, which never, at least in 
form, abated one jot or tittle of its 
Confession, seems at first sight irreconcil- 
able with the view we are advancing. 
But this growth is to be attributed, not 
to the distinctive creed, but to the wise, 
orderly, and admirably effective system 
of church government by which the 
Presbyterian body secured to itself a 
full share of the fruits of American 
Christianity. Indeed, the creed, so long 
held with the resolute tenacity character- 
istic of the Scottish race that brought it 



162 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

to these shores, has at last come to be felt 
as a burden too heavy to be borne. It 
must soon undergo revision. The result 
bids fair to be, as it was in the like case 
with the Congregationaiists, a " com- 
promise document." But the right of 
a liberal party within the Presbyterian 
Church will be established, and the last 
residuum of Protestant dogmatism will 
be officially opened to the leavening in- 
fluences of the religion of spirit. 

It may be objected that, while these 
facts do indeed show the decadence of 
the old theology, they fail to prove the 
decay of dogmatic religion in general. 
The objector, however, overlooks the all- 
important point that the religious move- 
ment which we have been examining 
was not so much a reaction against Cal- 
vinism as a protest against the interpre- 
tation of Christianity as a system of 
dogmas. Only half its meaning can be 
read from the modifications which have 
been made in the creeds. For those 
creeds, which are survivals of dogmatism, 
resist, like the Matter of Plato's cos- 
mology, the transforming breath of the 
creative spirit. It is the penalty of the 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 163 

new that it must always settle with 
the old ; and for this reason its true 
character is difficult to discern. But 
whoever will compare the best preaching 
of the present day with the sermons of 
the earlier part of the century will be 
aware of an entirely different atmosphere 
and attitude. Of doctrine there is now- 
adays scarce a word. Fuller, larger life 
is the ideal held before us. The poten- 
tial communion of man with God being 
assumed, as it always has been in religion, 
the whole strain of the preacher's discourse 
is directed towards quickening that po- 
tency into activity, making man's sonship 
vital and spiritual. He finds the quint- 
essence of the Gospel in the text : " I am 
come that ye might have life, and that ye 
might have it more abundantly." 

Few persons, who have not the oppor- 
tunity and the taste for verification, have 
any idea how sweeping has been the re- 
action against the religion of dogma. It 
has gone on gradually and, for the most 
part, silently, but with the force and 
efficacy of a process in nature. The 
revolution with which the modern world 
has been in travail is now accomplished. 



164 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

Yet the sight of it is a surprise even to 
the actors themselves. The hand is sub- 
dued to what it works in, and many of 
the clergy find it hard to conceive that 
the creeds which formed so large a part 
of the material of their theological train- 
ing are actually either obsolete or of minor 
consequence. But the laity, who have 
ceased to read them, are rallying to the 
support of practical and spiritual religion. 
The goal of this religious movement is 
not uncertain. It is, as Ave have seen, 
not the religion of humanity, though 
humanitarianism is one of its manifes- 
tations. Neither is it simple ethical cult- 
ure, though it leads to the full exploration 
and development of the moral nature of 
man. There can be no religion without 
God. And one great characteristic of 
the anti-dogmatic religion of the day is 
the conception of God, not as a capricious 
Power, not as an external Lawgiver and 
Judge, but as an Infinite Life and Spirit 
with whom the finite life and spirit that 
is ours may have fellowship and find ever- 
lasting joy. Personality in man moves 
out towards personality in God, and is 
met by it. The fuller our conception of 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 165 

personality, the truer and deeper will our 
religion be. It was a mistake of the older 
theologians, with their love of formula 
and finality, that they resolved the soul 
into a small number of definable faculties. 
It is one of the many boons we owe to 
recent psychology that it has taught us to 
recognize the Vague as well as the Definite 
in the life of the soul. Just in proportion 
as we see and reverence the mysterious 
depths of our own nature shall we rise in 
worship of the Eternal Spirit who is its 
source and ground. Spiritual religion is 
the conscious union of man and God. It 
defines itself only in the process of coming 
to be, and then only to the subjects of 
this process. 

If the result we have now reached, 
along different but converging lines, be 
correct, certain conclusions follow as corol- 
laries. These will serve to characterize 
a little more fully what we have ventured 
to call the religion of the future. 

First, spiritual religion will maintain a 
social organization. The church is rooted 
in the nature of things. It is the essence 
of spirit to express itself, to manifest itself 
to others, and to form associations with 



166 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

them. Of all shallow speculations, few 
are more absurd than the assumption that 
churches are the device of priests and 
parsons, the mere organs of dogmas whose 
decline they cannot outlive. The fact is 
that every good yields its goodness only 
when shared with others. Even gross 
material things, like food and drink, lose 
half their flavor when taken in solitude. 
The common meal is the first product of 
civilization. Art and science embody 
themselves in corporate institutions which 
nourish and diffuse them. The church. 
too. is essential to spiritual life, in which 
no man can live unto himself. 

If this was recognized when religion 
meant belief in dogma, how much more 
emphatically should it be recognized of 
spiritual religion ! Creeds and rituals 
split mankind into sects : in spiritual 
religion men are drawn together by com- 
munity of experience and aspiration. 
The religious man will feel (if he will 
but think of it) that he is an organ of a 
common life, which is the spirit of the 
church universal. Few things seem to 
me to be of more practical consequence 
for the future of religion in America than 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 167 

the duty of all good men to become iden- 
tified with the visible church. Liberal 
thinkers, have, as a rule, underestimated 
the value of the church. Their standpoint 
is individualistic, " as though a man were 
author of himself and knew no other kin." 
"The old is for slaves," they declare. 
But it is also true that the old is for f reed- 
men who know its true uses. It is the 
bane of the religion of dogma that it has 
driven many of the choicest religious souls 
out of the churches. In its purification 
of the temple, it has lost sight of the 
object of the temple. The church, as an 
institution, is an organism and embodi- 
ment such as the religion of spirit neces- 
sarily creates. Spiritual religion is not 
the enemy, it is the essence, of institu- 
tional religion. 

Secondly, the religion of spirit does not 
need a unique or separate sect. Such a 
limitation would contradict the univer- 
sality which, potentially at least, can even 
now be seen to characterize it. It is a 
Pentecostal outpouring which every one 
receives "in his own tongue, wherein 
he was born." It is a leaven working 
in all the sects. It uses what it finds 



168 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

to hand, recognizing frankly that the 
churches have gone beyond their starting- 
points, and to-day move toward goals 
which would have been inconceivable to 
their various founders. It pays little 
heed to the questions of speculation and 
church government out of which the 
denominations have arisen. It intrenches 
itself in the citadel, living on the best of 
terms with ritual and dogma which oc- 
cupy the outworks. The maintenance 
of this non-sectarian attitude, which is a 
present note of spiritual religion, may be 
predicted for the future, as it can certainly 
be asserted of the past. It is a well- 
known fact, though the meaning of it has 
not been apprehended, that the decline of 
dogmatic religion in modern times has 
given a check to the multiplication of 
sects. The development of spiritual 
religion in America has had for its con- 
comitant the consolidation of the great 
existing types of ecclesiastical organiza- 
tion. Creedal religion makes sects; 
spiritual religion uses them, and in using 
unites them. 

Thirdly, spiritual religion will make its 
home with any of the religious bodies 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 169 

which recognize it. It will more and 
more become the condition and the cri- 
terion of church membership. As at 
the present day, so presumably in the 
future, there will be in all the churches 
men who, according to their various char- 
acters and stages of development, stand 
pre-eminently for ritual, for dogma, or 
for spirit. But the latter class is likely 
to increase with considerable rapidity. 
And it will shape the church of the fut- 
ure. The first business of such men must 
be to understand and sympathize with 
their brethren who have not yet escaped 
the bondage of rites and formulae. One 
thing they must not do : they must not 
part company with them. How is the 
divinely ordained education of the human 
race to be achieved, if the children of 
light mass their torches and leave their 
less favored brethren in absolute dark- 
ness ? Humanity is a school of spiritual 
culture only (if I may appropriate a fine 
thought of Martineau's) when its mem- 
bers, who have a common nature but 
diversified attainments, group themselves 
into organizations of like and unlike, 
analogous to that of the family, which is 



170 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

the miniature type of every moral organ- 
ism. Consequently, if a true Christian 
discovers that the creed of his church is 
no longer tenable, his plain duty (other 
considerations apart) is not to leave the 
church, but to let his light so shine that 
others may come to a knowledge of the 
fact that the church is not the mere em- 
bodiment of a creed, but the plastic 
organization of a life which is spiritual. 
His insight into the real situation of affairs 
forbids desertion, even though he is aware 
that fidelity may be rewarded by banish- 
ment or persecution. 

Such a course is apt to be denounced 
both by the religious and by the secular 
press. It is held that the defence is 
sophistical and disingenuous, and that 
those who plead it are undermining moral- 
ity as well as religion. Now I will not 
deny, though I will not aver, that, in the 
case of those holding clerical positions of 
honor and emolument, the course here 
recommended may be unwise, for the 
simple reason that their motives may be 
misinterpreted by those who are always 
ready to- catch the " appearance of evil." 
But, apart from this consideration of 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 171 

expediency, I see no reason why an hon- 
est man should withdraw from a com- 
munion in many of whose formularies he 
has ceased to believe. My reasons for 
this conclusion are, however, very dif- 
ferent from those usually adduced. To 
read into the articles of faith propositions 
which they never contemplated, or were 
even expressly framed to deny, seems to 
me intellectual jugglery and moral palter- 
ing, of the most shameless sort. But this 
sophistry is the product of the religion of 
dogma ; it is the deposit left by the cor- 
rosion of doubt. Protestant Christianity, 
speaking generally, has put away, as we 
have seen, the religion of dogma, and is 
even now rising to the heights of spiritual 
religion. To this religion no one can be 
true who makes the creed the condition 
or test of fellowship. Varieties of church 
government have perhaps originated more 
sects than varieties of doctrine ; and in 
the near future it will be thought as 
absurd to leave a church because one 
disagrees with its detailed formulation of 
doctrine as it would seem to-day to leave 
it because one thinks its system of gov- 
ernment not altogether perfect. 



172 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

Doctrine, worship, and polity will, doubt- 
less, in the future, be brought into closer 
harmony with spiritual religion than we 
see to-day. But the change will be 
wrought silently and from within out- 
wards. Agitations for the revision of 
doctrines and modes of worship are not 
desirable, if they concentrate attention 
upon these subordinate elements of relig- 
ion. If, as is frequently the case, they 
help many persons to see that there is 
something higher, they conduce to real 
progress. Plainly, the religious bodies 
best organized for development are those 
which have adopted the principle of local 
independency. Each church can differen- 
tiate itself according to the requirements 
of its inner life and its outer environment. 
While the movement from dogmatic to 
spiritual religion is in progress, these 
various Independent denominations are 
likely to be the favorite homes of liberal 
Christianity. When, on the other hand, 
the movement is completed (if it ever is), 
the American preference for stable ecclesi- 
astical order can scarcely fail to inure to 
the benefit of the Presbyterian and Epis- 
copal bodies. The latter has, indeed, some 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 173 

advantages. For it has not, to the same 
extent, enveloped religion in dogma, and 
thus it cannot suffer so much from des- 
quamation. The impressiveness of its 
liturgy arid the grace and good sense of 
its forms — which in the seventeenth 
century filled Laud with a consuming 
sense of the " beauty of holiness," and 
in the nineteenth drew from Emerson 
the comment, "By taste are ye saved" — 
give scope and satisfaction to the aesthetic 
sentiments which in recent times have 
gained a very prominent place in the 
worship of all religious bodies. It is 
conceivable that some such organization 
as the Episcopal Church might ultimately 
become the catholic organ for that spirit- 
ual religion which seeks to express itself 
in symbols and in creeds. But the ex- 
perience of a century suggests that in the 
four or five favored and consolidated types 
of " strenuously competing sects," Ave have 
a diversity founded upon ineradicable dif- 
ferences in the religious life of our people. 
Fourthly, spiritual religion will lead to a 
modification, if not to an abandonment, of 
the conception of authority in religion. 
Authority is properly predicated of a sov- 



174 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

ereigru He has the right, or at any rate 
the power, of enforcing his commands. 
But if the ruler's will is law to his sub- 
jects, it is only on condition that it limit 
itself to prescribing or prohibiting certain 
kinds of actions. Not even a despot can 
command the thoughts and the spirit of a 
man. It is for conduct alone that the 
sovereign is an authority. Accordingly, 
we conclude that in so far as religion is 
conceived as consisting of acts or observ- 
ances, - — and these constitute the relig- 
ion of cult, — it is proper to speak of an 
authority in religion. In the second place, 
the term " authority " is metaphorically 
predicated of specialists who have mas- 
tered the facts and laws of any particular 
field of investigation. Edison is thus an 
authority in applied electricity, Huxley in 
physiology, and Zeller in Greek Philoso- 
phy. These masters tell me what I should 
believe in their specialties, and I accept 
their teachings. If, in the same way, I 
recognize a man or a council or a book as 
competent to lay down valid propositions 
in theology, the man or the council or the 
book is to me an authority. Those who 
identify religion with belief in dogma are 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 175 

within the line of possibilities when they 
speak of authority in religion ; that there 
is such an authority, however, is not a 
consequence of the inherent admissibility 
of the conception. 

But if it is not impossible to think of 
an external authority — even a final and 
infallible one — for the religion of cult and 
the religion of creed, it is a contradiction 
in terms to suppose that there can be, ulti- 
mately at least, any authority for spiritual 
religion outside the soul which experiences 
it. Autonomy, not heteronomy, is the way 
of the spirit. But since we rise to spirit- 
ual life through successive stages of devel- 
opment (for the baby is only potentially 
a spirit), the agencies which stimulate and 
incite us to self-realization may, in a de- 
rivative sense, be designated the authori- 
ties for our religious culture. Without 
them we should not have reached the 
stature of perfect men, or acquired the 
freedom whereby the spirit becomes its 
own sole and absolute authority. This 
religious experience is paralleled by the 
moral. The source of moral obligation 
for the child and for the undeveloped 
adult is the will of the family, of society, 



176 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

of the state, and even of God. The virtu- 
ous man, on the other hand, knows that, 
while he is a fellow-worker with all the 
moral forces, human and divine, in the 
universe, duty would become mere legal 
or mechanical obligation could any one 
impose it upon the free spirit but itself. 
Yet if the good man is also a philosopher, 
he must recognize that that free spirit 
could never have come to itself, that the 
individual could never have developed into 
a personality, but for his training in and 
through society and under law, to both of 
which he has, nevertheless, in course of 
time, come to feel his own moral essence 
to be superior. 

Just as law and society are authorities 
in morality, so the Bible and the church 
are authorities in religion. Through these 
disciplines we make our way — at least, 
some do — to the higher altitudes of free 
and self-supporting moral and religious 
life. But many fail to reach this stage ; 
and even those who succeed would surely 
fall, if deprived of the guides and helps 
that led and aided their steps. 

The function of the Bible and the church 
is, in this regard, educative. The noblest 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 111 

souls will feel most deeply their value, as ■ 
they would be the last to belittle the func- 
tion of law and society in the moraliza- 
tion of. mankind. By its worship, even 
if it be merely formal, the church puts 
men in the mechanical attitude of piety ; 
and, owing to the wonderful connection 
between our mind and our motor mechan- 
ism, the muscular exercise reacts upon 
consciousness and quickens the germs of 
religious life. No doubt Pascal carried 
the matter to an extreme, when he coun- 
selled men to take holy water and observe 
ceremonies, as if the rest would come of 
itself. But the general principle is sound: 
it is the foundation of the histrionic art ; 
and one of our most eminent psycholo- 
gists has come to the conclusion that joy 
and sorrow are the effects, not the causes, 
of laughing and of crying. But besides 
its ritual, the church has its articles of 
faith. The memorizing of these stands 
in much the same relation to spiritual 
religion as the learning of the multipli- 
cation table to the reasonings of the origi- 
nal mathematician. Lastly, no description 
could well exaggerate the value of the 
Bible as an agency for the development 



178 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

of spiritual religion in the soul. This 
religion emerges, when the human and the 
Divine spirit meet and embrace. Now 
the Bible is a record, on a large scale, of 
man's reaching out after God and of God's 
communication of Himself to man. It re- 
veals God as inflexible righteousness and 
as infinite love. What a glass it is through 
which to see the ever-living God ! But 
how useless, when you put your eyes out ! 
A scholar, who is the ornament of a great 
church, was recently on trial for heresy be- 
cause of his contention that the Bible, the 
church, and the soul (or what he calls 
" reason ") are the three sources of author- 
ity in religion. His accusers assert there 
is only one ultimate authority. If the 
foregoing analysis be correct, neither party 
has the whole truth and each has a por- 
tion. There is only one ultimate author- 
ity in religion, — we mean spiritual and 
not dogmatic religion, — and this is the 
free spirit of man which finds itself in 
life with God. The Bible and the church, 
it is true, are, in a certain sense, authori- 
ties : they have the authority of peda- 
gogues who train us up to the religion of 
spirit. The terms " authority," " finality," 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 179 

" infallibility," and the like, are, however, 
all borrowed from the religion of dogma. 
They are all inapplicable to the highest 
stage of religion, which is not an objective 
fact, but a subjective attitude — an ever- 
tending, never-ending process of com- 
munion with God. 

Fifthly, and lastly, the religion of spirit 
will be not only theistic, but Christian. 
Christianity affirms that God and man 
exist for one another ; that human beings 
are children of the Divine Father who loves 
them with an exhaustless love, and that 
they find their blessedness in a correspon- 
dent love of Him. This was the gospel 
of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is the founda- 
tion of all spiritual religion. But there is 
another sense in which, as I believe, the 
religion of the future will be Christian. 
Some liberal thinkers, indeed, have come 
to the conclusion that the personality of 
the author of Christianity is a matter of 
indifference to our religious life, if we are 
not deprived of his noble and exalted 
teachings. Others would be satisfied with 
a good example. But this position I hold to 
be erroneous. Like the religion of dogma, 
it springs from an inadequate conception 



180 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 

of the soul as mere intellect feeding upon 
truth. But the soul is living spirit. It 
grows and realizes itself by contact with 
spirit. I am moved more by my vision of 
the personality of Jesus than I am by my 
thought of His doctrines. Spiritual growth 
is brought about by the impact of nobler 
souls on ours. Consequently, I cannot 
understand the Voltaire-like petulance 
with which, in his Divinity School Ad- 
dress, Emerson banished "the person of 
Jesus " from genuine religion. He thinks 
that you cannot be a man if you "niust 
subordinate your nature to Christ's nat- 
ure." It seems to me, however, that you 
realize your capacities only by coming into 
contact with their realization in others. 
The objectified self reveals the subjective 
aptitude ; and with the thrill of discovery 
begins the higher development. Spiritual 
growth is the attainment of those who con- 
stantly look up to higher personalities. 
Now if it is true of Jesus Christ (as Emer- 
son says in the address) that " alone in all 
history, he estimated the greatness of 
man : one man was true to what is in you 
and me," then I should say that you and 
I are to find our own highest life by open- 



SPIRITUAL RELIGION 181 

ing our souls to the influence of this per- 
fect and absolute personality. Nay, as 
Jesus Christ was perfect man, so also, and 
for that very reason, was He the revelation 
and realization of the Divine Father. In 
the new dispensation of spirit, as in the 
old of dogma, He must, therefore, in some 
sense, if not the orthodox sense, continue 
to be our Mediator and Saviour. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 244 384 3 



